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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of King--of the Khyber Rifles, by Talbot Mundy
+(#7 in our series by Talbot Mundy)
+
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+
+Title: King--of the Khyber Rifles
+
+Author: Talbot Mundy
+
+Release Date: July, 2004  [EBook #6066]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on November 1, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, KING--OF THE KHYBER RIFLES ***
+
+
+
+
+Digital transcription by M.R.J.
+
+
+King--of the Khyber Rifles
+        A romance of adventure
+        By Talbot Mundy
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+
+
+Suckled were we in a school unkind
+On suddenly snatched deduction
+And ever ahead of you (never behind!)
+Over the border our tracks you'll find,
+Wherever some idiot feels inclined
+To scatter the seeds of ruction.
+
+For eyes we be, of Empire, we!
+Skinned and Puckered and quick to see
+And nobody guesses how wise we be.
+Unwilling to advertise we be.
+But, hot on the trail of ties, we be
+The pullers of roots of ruction!
+
+--Son of the Indian Secret Service
+
+
+The men who govern India--more power to them and her!--are few.
+Those who stand in their way and pretend to help them with a flood
+of words are a host.  And from the host goes up an endless cry that
+India is the home of thugs, and of three hundred million hungry ones.
+
+The men who know--and Athelstan King might claim to know a little--
+answer that she is the original home of chivalry and the modern
+mistress of as many decent, gallant, native gentlemen as ever
+graced a page of history.
+
+The charge has seen the light in print that India--well-spring of
+plague and sudden death and money-lenders--has sold her soul to
+twenty succeeding conquerors in turn.
+ 
+Athelstan King and a hundred like him whom India has picked from
+British stock and taught, can answer truly that she has won it back
+again from each by very purity of purpose.
+
+So when the world war broke the world was destined to be surprised
+on India's account.  The Red Sea, full of racing transports crowded
+with dark-skinned gentlemen, whose one prayer was that the war might
+not be over before they should have struck a blow for Britain, was
+the Indian army's answer to the press.
+
+The rest of India paid its taxes and contributed and muzzled itself
+and set to work to make supplies.  For they understand in India,
+almost as nowhere else, the meaning of such old-fashioned words
+as gratitude and honor;  and of such platitudes as, "Give and it
+shall be given unto you."
+
+More than one nation was deeply shocked by India's answer to
+"practises" that had extended over years.  But there were men in
+India who learned to love India long ago with that love that casts
+out fear, who knew exactly what was going to happen and could
+therefore afford to wait for orders instead of running round in rings.
+
+Athelstan King, for instance, nothing yet but a captain unattached,
+sat in meagerly furnished quarters with his heels on a table.  He
+is not a doctor, yet he read a book on surgery, and when he went
+over to the club he carried the book under his arm and continued
+to read it there.  He is considered a rotten conversationalist,
+and he did nothing at the club to improve his reputation.
+
+"Man alive--get a move on!" gasped a wondering senior, accepting
+a cigar.  Nobody knows where he gets those long, strong, black
+cheroots, and nobody ever refuses one.
+
+"Thanks--got a book to read," said King.
+
+"You ass!  Wake up and grab the best thing in sight, as a stepping
+stone to something better!  Wake up and worry!"
+
+King grinned.  You have to when you don't agree with a senior officer,
+for the army is like a school in many more ways than one.
+
+"Help yourself, sir!  I'll take the job that's left when the scramble's
+over.  Something good's sure to be overlooked."
+
+"White feather?  Laziness?  Dark Horse?" the major wondered.  Then
+he hurried away to write telegrams, because a belief thrives in
+the early days of any war that influence can make or break a man's
+chances.  In the other room where the telegraph blanks were littered
+in confusion all about the floor, he ran into a crony whose chief
+sore point was Athelstan King, loathing him as some men loathe
+pickles or sardines, for no real reason whatever, except that they
+are what they are.
+
+"Saw you talking to King," he said.
+
+"Yes.  Can't make him out.  Rum fellow!"
+
+"Rum?  Huh!  Trouble is he's seventh of his family in succession
+to serve in India.  She has seeped into him and pickled his heritage.
+He's a believer in Kismet crossed on to Opportunity.  Not sure he
+doesn't pray to Allah on the sly!  Hopeless case."
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"Quite!"
+
+So they all sent telegrams and forgot King who sat and smoked and
+read about surgery;  and before he had nearly finished one box of
+cheroots a general at Peshawur wiped a bald red skull and sent him
+an urgent telegram.
+
+"Come at once!" it said simply.
+
+King was at Lahore, but miles don't matter when the dogs of war
+are loosed.  The right man goes to the right place at the exact
+right time then, and the fool goes to the wall.  In that one respect
+war is better than some kinds of peace.
+
+In the train on the way to Peshawur he did not talk any more volubly,
+and a fellow traveler, studying him from the opposite corner of
+the stifling compartment, catalogued him as "quite an ordinary man."
+But he was of the Public Works Department, which is sorrowfully
+underpaid and wears emotions on its sleeve for policy's sake,
+believing of course that all the rest of the world should do the same.
+
+"Don't you think we're bound in honor to go to Belgium's aid?" he
+asked. "Can you see any way out of it?"
+
+"Haven't looked for one," said King.
+
+"But don't you think--"
+
+"No," said King.  "I hardly ever think.  I'm in the army, don't
+you know, and don't have to.  What's the use of doing somebody else's
+work?"
+
+"Rotter!" thought the P.W.D. man, almost aloud;  but King was not
+troubled by any further forced conversation.  Consequently he reached
+Peshawur comfortable, in spite of the heat.  And his genial manner
+of saluting the full-general who met him with a dog-cart at Peshawur
+station was something scandalous.
+ 
+"Is he a lunatic or a relative or royalty?" the P.W.D. man wondered.
+ 
+Full-generals, particularly in the early days of war, do not drive
+to the station to meet captains very often;  yet King climbed into
+the dog-cart unexcitedly, after keeping the general waiting while
+he checked a trunk!
+
+The general cracked his whip without any other comment than a smile.
+A blood mare tore sparks out of the macadam, and a dusty military
+road began to ribbon out between the wheels.  Sentries in unexpected
+places announced themselves with a ring of shaken steel as their
+rifles came to the "present," which courtesies the general noticed
+with a raised whip.  Then a fox-terrier resumed his chase of squirrels
+between the planted shade-trees, and Peshawur became normal,
+shimmering in light and heat reflected from the "Hills."
+
+(The P.W.D. man, who would have giggled if a general mentioned him
+by name, walked because no conveyance could be hired. judgment was
+in the wind.)
+
+On the dog-cart's high front seat, staring straight ahead of him
+between the horse's ears, King listened.  The general did nearly
+all the talking.
+
+"The North's the danger."
+
+King grunted with the lids half-lowered over full dark eyes.  He
+did not look especially handsome in that attitude.  Some men swear
+he looks like a Roman, and others liken him to a gargoyle, all of
+them choosing to ignore the smile that can transform his whole face
+instantly.
+
+"We're denuding India of troops--not keeping back more than a mere
+handful to hold the tribes in check."
+
+King nodded.  There has never been peace along the northwest border.
+It did not need vision to foresee trouble from that quarter.  In
+fact it must have been partly on the strength of some of King's
+reports that the general was planning now.
+
+"That was a very small handful of Sikhs you named as likely to give
+trouble.  Did you do that job thoroughly?"
+
+King grunted.
+
+"Well--Delhi's chock-full of spies, all listening to stories made
+in Germany for them to take back to the 'Hills' with 'em.  The
+tribes'll know presently how many men we're sending oversea.
+There've been rumors about Khinjan by the hundred lately.  They're
+cooking something.  Can you imagine 'em keeping quiet now?"
+
+"That depends, sir.  Yes, I can imagine it."
+
+The general laughed.  "That's why I sent for you.  I need a man
+with imagination!  There's a woman you've got to work with on this
+occasion who can imagine a shade or two too much.  What's worse,
+she's ambitious.  So I chose you to work with her."
+
+King's lips stiffened under his mustache, and the corners of his
+eyes wrinkled into crow's-feet to correspond.  Eyes are never coal-
+black, of course, but his looked it at that minute.
+
+"You know we've sent men to Khinjan who are said to have entered
+the Caves.  Not one of 'em has ever returned."
+
+King frowned.
+
+"She claims she can enter the Caves and come out again at pleasure.
+She has offered to do it, and I have accepted."
+
+It would not have been polite to look incredulous, so King's
+expression changed to one of intense interest a little overdone,
+as the general did not fail to notice.
+
+"If she hadn't given proof of devotion and ability, I'd have turned
+her down.  But she has.  Only the other day she uncovered a plot
+in Delhi--about a million dynamite bombs in a ruined temple in charge
+of a German agent for use by mutineers supposed to be ready to rise
+against us.  Fact!  Can you guess who she is?"
+
+"Not Yasmini?" King hazarded, and the general nodded and flicked
+his whip.  The horse mistook it for a signal, and it was two minutes
+before the speed was reduced to mere recklessness.
+
+The helmet-strap mark, printed indelibly on King's jaw and cheek
+by the Indian sun, tightened and grew whiter--as the general noted
+out of the corner of his eye.
+
+"Know her?"
+
+"Know of her, of course, sir.  Everybody does.  Never met her to
+my knowledge."
+
+"Um-m-m!  Whose fault was that?  Somebody ought to have seen to that.
+Go to Delhi now and meet her.  I'll send her a wire to say you're
+coming.  She knows I've chosen you.  She tried to insist on full
+discretion, but I overruled her.  Between us two, she'll have
+discretion once she gets beyond Jamrud.  The 'Hills' are full of
+our spies, of course, but none of 'em dare try Khinjan Caves any
+more and you'll be the only check we shall have on her."
+
+King's tongue licked his lips, and his eyes wrinkled.  The general's
+voice became the least shade more authoritative.
+
+"When you see her, get a pass from her that'll take you into Khinjan
+Caves!  Ask her for it!  For the sake of appearances I'll gazette
+you Seconded to the Khyber Rifles.  For the sake of success, get
+a pass from her!"
+
+"Very well, sir."
+
+"You've a brother in the Khyber Rifles, haven't you?  Was it you
+or your brother who visited Khinjan once and sent in a report?"
+
+"I did, sir."
+
+He spoke without pride.  Even the brigade of British-Indian cavalry
+that went to Khinjan on the strength of his report and leveled its
+defenses with the ground, had not been able to find the famous Caves.
+Yet the Caves themselves are a by-word.
+
+"There's talk of a jihad (holy war).  There's worse than that!  When
+you went to Khinjan, what was your chief object?"
+
+"To find the source of the everlasting rumors about the so-called
+'Heart of the Hills,' sir."
+
+"Yes, yes.  I remember.  I read your report.  You didn't find anything,
+did you?  Well.  The story is now that the 'Heart of the Hills' has
+come to life.  So the spies say."
+
+King whistled softly.
+
+"There's no guessing what it means," said the general.  "Go and
+find out.  Go and work with Yasmini.  I shall have enough men here
+to attack instantly and smash any small force as soon as it begins
+to gather anywhere near the border.  But Khinjan is another story.
+We can't prove anything, but the spies keep bringing in rumors of
+ten thousand men in Khinjan Caves, and of another large lashkar
+not far away from Khinjan.  There must be no jihad, King!  India
+is all but defenseless!  We can tackle sporadic raids.  We can even
+handle an ordinary raid in force.  But this story about a 'Heart
+of the Hills' coming to life may presage unity of action and a holy
+war such as the world has not seen.  Go up there and stop it if
+you can.  At least, let me know the facts."
+
+King grunted.  To stop a holy war single-handed would be rather
+like stopping the wind--possibly easy enough, if one knew the way.
+Yet he knew no general would throw away a man like himself on a
+useless venture.  He began to look happy.
+
+The general clucked to the mare and the big beast sank an inch
+between the shafts.  The sais behind set his feet against the drop-
+board and clung with both hands to the seat.  One wheel ceased to
+touch the gravel as they whirled along a semicircular drive.  Suddenly
+the mare drew up on her haunches, under the porch of a pretentious
+residence.  Sentries saluted.  The sais swung down.  In less than
+sixty seconds King was following the general through a wide entrance
+into a crowded hall.  The instant the general's fat figure darkened
+the doorway twenty men of higher rank than King, native and English,
+rose from lined-up chairs and pressed forward.
+
+"Sorry--have to keep you all waiting--busy!"  He waved them aside
+with a little apologetic gesture.  "Come in here, King."
+
+King followed him through a door that slammed tight behind them
+on rubber jambs.
+
+"Sit down!"
+
+The general unlocked a steel drawer and began to rummage among the
+papers in it.  In a minute he produced a package, bound in rubber
+bands, with a faded photograph face-upward on the top.
+
+"That's the woman!  How d'you like the look of her?"
+
+King took the package and for a minute stared hard at the likeness
+of a woman whose fame has traveled up and down India, until her
+witchery has become a proverb.  She was dressed as a dancing woman,
+yet very few dancing women could afford to be dressed as she was.
+
+King's service uses whom it may, and he had met and talked with
+many dancing women in the course of duty;  but as he stared at
+Yasmini's likeness he did not think he had ever met one who so
+measured up to rumor.  The nautch he knew for a delusion.  Yet--!
+
+The general watched his face with eyes that missed nothing.
+
+"Remember--I said work with her!"
+
+King looked up and nodded.
+
+"They say she's three parts Russian," said the general.  "To my
+own knowledge she speaks Russian like a native, and about twenty
+other tongues as well, including English.  She speaks English as
+well as you or I.  She was the girl-widow of a rascally Hill-rajah.
+There's a story I've heard, to the effect that Russia arranged her
+marriage in the day when India was Russia's objective--and that's
+how long ago?--seems like weeks, not years!  I've heard she loved
+her rajah.  And I've heard she didn't!  There's another story that
+she poisoned him.  I know she got away with his money--and that's
+proof enough of brains!  Some say she's a she-devil.  I think that's
+an exaggeration, but bear in mind she's dangerous!"
+
+King grinned.  A man who trusts Eastern women over readily does
+not rise far in the Secret Service.
+
+"If you've got nous enough to keep on her soft side and use her--
+not let her use you--you can keep the 'Hills' quiet and the Khyber
+safe!  If you can contrive that--now--in this pinch--there's no
+limit for you!  Commander-in-chief shall be your job before
+you're sixty!"
+
+King pocketed the photograph and papers.  "I'm well enough content,
+sir, as things are," he said quietly.
+
+"Well, remember she's ambitious, even if you're not!  I'm not
+preaching ambition, mind--I'm warning you!  Ambition's bad!  Study
+those papers on your way down to Delhi and see that I get them back."
+
+The general paced once across the room and once back again, with
+hands behind him.  Then he stopped in front of King.
+
+"No man in India has a stiffer task than you have now!  It may
+encourage you to know that I realize that!  She's the key to the
+puzzle, and she happens to be in Delhi.  Go to Delhi, then.  A
+jihad launched from the 'Hills' would mean anarchy in the plains.
+That would entail sending back from France an army that can't be
+spared.  There must be no jihad, King!--There must--not--be--one!
+Keep that in your head!"
+
+"What arrangements have been made with her, sir?"
+
+"Practically none!  She's watching the spies in Delhi, but they're
+likely to break for the 'Hills' any minute.  Then they'll be arrested.
+When that happens the fate of India may be in your hands and hers!
+Get out of my way now, until tiffin-time!"
+
+In a way that some men never learn, King proceeded to efface himself
+entirely among the crowd in the hall, contriving to say nothing
+of any account to anybody until the great gong boomed and the general
+led them all in to his long dining table.  Yet he did not look
+furtive or secretive.  Nobody noticed him, and he noticed everybody.
+There is nothing whatever secretive about that.
+
+The fare was plain, and the meal a perfunctory affair.  The general
+and his guests were there for other reason than to eat food, and
+only the man who happened to seat himself next to King--a major
+by the name of Hyde--spoke to him at all.
+
+"Why aren't you with your regiment?" he asked.
+
+"Because the general asked me to lunch, sir!"
+
+"I suppose you've been pestering him for an appointment!"
+
+King, with his mouth full of curr did not answer, but his eyes smiled.
+
+"It's astonishing to me," said the major, "that a captain should
+leave his company when war has begun!  When I was captain I'd have
+been driven out of the service if I'd asked for leave of absence
+at such a time!"
+
+King made no comment, but his expression denoted belief.
+
+"Are you bound for the front, sir?" he asked presently.  But Hyde
+did not answer.  They finished the meal in silence.
+
+After lunch he was closeted with the general again for twenty minutes.
+Then one of the general's carriages took him to the station;  and
+it did not appear to trouble him at all that the other occupant of
+the carriage was the self-same Major Hyde who had sat next him at
+lunch.  In fact, he smiled so pleasantly that Hyde grew exasperated.
+Neither of them spoke.  At the station Hyde lost his temper openly,
+and King left him abusing an unhappy native servant.
+
+The station was crammed to suffocation by a crowd that roared and
+writhed and smelt to high heaven.  At one end of the platform, in
+the midst of a human eddy, a frenzied horse resisted with his teeth
+and all four feet at once the efforts of six natives and a British
+sergeant to force him into a loose-box.  At the back of the same
+platform the little dark-brown mules of a mountain battery twitched
+their flanks in line, jingling chains and stamping when the flies
+bit home.
+
+Flies buzzed everywhere.  Fat native merchants vied with lean and
+timid ones in noisy effort to secure accommodation on a train already
+crowded to the limit.  Twenty British officers hunted up and down
+for the places supposed to have been reserved for them, and sweating
+servants hurried after them with arms full of heterogeneous baggage,
+swearing at the crowd that swore back ungrudgingly.  But the general
+himself had telephoned for King's reservation, so he took his time.
+
+There were din and stink and dust beneath a savage sun, shaken into
+reverberations by the scream of an engine's safety valve.  It was
+India in essence and awake!--India arising out of lethargy!--India
+as she is more often nowadays--and it made King, for the time being
+of the Khyber Rifles, happier than some other men can be in ballrooms.
+
+Any one who watched him--and there was at least one man who did--
+must have noticed his strange ability, almost like that of water,
+to reach the point he aimed for, through, and not around, the crowd.
+
+He neither shoved nor argued. Orders and blows would have been
+equally useless, for had it tried the crowd could not have obeyed,
+and it was in no mind to try.  Without the least apparent effort
+he arrived--and there is no other word that quite describes it--he
+arrived, through the densest part of the sweating throng of humans,
+at the door of the luggage office.
+
+There, though a bunnia's sharp elbow nagged his ribs, and the bunnia's
+servant dropped a heavy package on his foot, he smiled so genially
+that he melted the wrath of the frantic luggage clerk.  But not at
+once.  Even the sun needs seconds to melt ice.
+
+"Am I God?" the babu wailed.  "Can I do all the-e things in all
+the-e world at once if not sooner?"
+
+King's smile began to get its work in.  The man ceased gesticulating
+to wipe sweat from his stubbly jowl with the end of a Punjabi headdress.
+He actually smiled back.  Who was he, that he should suspect new
+outrage or guess he was about to be used in a game he did not
+understand?  He would have stopped all work to beg for extra pay
+at the merest suggestion of such a thing;  but as it was he raised
+both fists and lapsed into his own tongue to apostrophize the ruffian
+who dared jostle King.  A Northerner who did not seem to understand
+Punjabi almost cost King his balance as he thrust broad shoulders
+between him and the bunnia.
+
+The bunnia chattered like an outraged ape;  but King, the person
+most entitled to be angry, actually apologized!  That being a miracle,
+the babu forthwith wrought another one, and within a minute King's
+one trunk was checked through to Delhi.
+
+"Delhi is right, sahib?" he asked, to make doubly sure;  for in
+India where the milk of human kindness is not hawked in the market-
+place, men will pay over-measure for a smile.
+
+"Yes.  Delhi is right.  Thank you, babuji."
+
+He made more room for the Hillman, beaming amusement at the man's
+impatience;  but the Hillman had no luggage and turned away, making
+an unexpected effort to hide his face with a turban end.  He who
+had forced his way to the front with so much violence and haste
+now burst back again toward the train like a football forward tearing
+through the thick of his opponents.  He scattered a swath a yard
+wide, for he had shoulders like a bull.  King saw him leap into
+third-class carriage.   He saw, too, that he was not wanted in the
+carriage.  There was a storm of protest from tight-packed native
+passengers, but the fellow had his way.
+
+The swath through the crowd closed up like water in a ship's wake,
+but it opened again for King.  He smiled so humorously that the
+angry jostled ones smiled too and were appeased, forgetting haste
+and bruises and indignity merely because understanding looked at
+them through merry eyes.  All crowds are that way, but an Indian
+crowd more so than all.
+
+Taking his time, and falling foul of nobody, King marked down a
+native constable--hot and unhappy, leaning with his back against
+the train.  He touched him on the shoulder and the fellow jumped.
+
+"Nay, sahib!  I am only constabeel--I know nothing--I can do nothing!
+The teerain goes when it goes, and then perhaps we will beat these
+people from the platform and make room again!  But there is no
+authority--no law any more--they are all gone mad!"
+
+King wrote on a pad, tore off a sheet, folded it and gave it to him.
+
+"That is for the Superintendent of Police at the office.  Carriage
+number 1181, eleven doors from here--the one with the shut door
+and a big Hillman inside sitting three places from the door facing
+the engine.  Get the Hillman!  No, there is only one Hillman in
+the carriage.  No, the others are not his friends;  they will not
+help him.  He will fight, but he has no friends in that carriage."
+
+The "constabeel" obeyed, not very cheerfully.  King stood to watch
+him with a foot on the step of a first-class coach.  Another
+constable passed him, elbowing a snail's progress between the train
+and the crowd.  He seized the man's arm.
+ 
+"Go and help that man!" he ordered.  "Hurry!"
+
+Then he climbed into the carriage and leaned from the window.  He
+grinned as he saw both constables pounce on a third-class carriage
+door and, with the yell of good huntsmen who have viewed, seize
+the protesting Northerner by the leg and begin to drag him forth.
+There was a fight, that lasted three minutes, in the course of which
+a long knife flashed.  But there were plenty to help take the knife
+away, and the Hillman stood handcuffed and sullen at last, while
+one of his captors bound a cut forearm.  Then they dragged him away;
+but not before he bad seen King at the window, and had lipped a
+silent threat.
+
+"I believe you, my son!" King chuckled, half aloud.  "I surely
+believe you!  I'll watch!  Ham dekta hai!"
+
+"Why was that man arrested?" asked an acid voice behind him;  and
+without troubling to turn his head, he knew that Major Hyde was
+to be his carriage mate again.  To be vindictive, on duty or off it,
+is foolishness;  but to let opportunity slip by one is a crime.  He
+looked glad, not sorry, as be faced about--pleased, not disappointed--
+like a man on a desert island who has found a tool.
+
+"Why was that man arrested?" the major asked again.
+
+"I ordered it," said King.
+
+"So I imagined.  I asked you why."
+
+King stared at him and then turned to watch the prisoner being
+dragged away;  he was fighting again, striking at his captors' heads
+with handcuffed wrists.
+
+"Does he look innocent?" asked King.
+
+"Is that your answer?" asked the major.  Balked ambition is an ugly
+horse to ride.  He had tried for a command but had been shelved.
+
+"I have sufficient authority," said King, unruffled.  He spoke as
+if he were thinking of something entirely different.  His eyes were
+as if they saw the major from a very long way off and rather approved
+of him on the whole.
+
+"Show me your authority, please!"
+
+King dived into an inner pocket and produced a card that had about
+ten words written on its face, above a general's signature.  Hyde
+read it and passed it back.
+
+"So you're one of those, are you!" he said in a tone of voice that
+would start a fight in some parts of the world and in some services.
+But King nodded cheerfully, and that annoyed the major more than ever;
+he snorted, closed his mouth with a snap and turned to rearrange
+the sheet and pillow on his berth.
+
+Then the train pulled out, amid a din of voices from the left--behind
+that nearly drowned the panting of overloaded engine.  There was a
+roar of joy from the two coaches full of soldiers in the rear--a
+shriek from a woman who had missed the train--a babel of farewells
+tossed back and forth between the platform and the third-class
+carriages--and Peshawur fell away behind.
+
+King settled down on his side of the compartment, after a struggle
+with the thermantidote that refused to work.  There was heat enough
+below the roof to have roasted meat, so that the physical atmosphere
+became as turgid as the mental after a little while.
+
+Hyde all but stripped himself and drew on striped pajamas.  King
+was content to lie in shirt-sleeves on the other berth, with knees
+raised, so that Hyde could not overlook the general's papers.  At
+his ease he studied them one by one, memorizing a string of names,
+with details as to their owners' antecedents and probable present
+whereabouts.  There were several photographs in the packet, and he
+studied them very carefully indeed.
+
+But much most carefully of all he examined Yasmini's portrait,
+returning to it again and again.  He reached the conclusion in the
+end that when it was taken she had been cunningly disguised.
+
+"This was intended for purpose of identification at a given time
+and place," he told himself.
+
+"Were you muttering at me?" asked Hyde.
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"It looked extremely like it!"
+
+"My mistake, sir.  Nothing of the sort intended."
+
+"H-rrrrr-ummmmmph!"
+
+Hyde turned an indignant back on him, and King studied the back as
+if he found it interesting.  On the whole he looked sympathetic,
+so it was as well that Hyde did not look around.  Balked ambition
+as a rule loathes sympathy.
+
+After many prickly-hot, interminable, jolting hours the train drew
+up at Rawal-Pindi station.  Instantly King was on his feet with
+his tunic on, and he was out on the blazing hot platform before
+the train's motion had quite ceased.
+
+He began to walk up and down, not elbowing but percolating through
+the crowd, missing nothing worth noticing in all the hot kaleidoscope
+and seeming to find new amusement at every turn.  It was not in
+the least astonishing that a well-dressed native should address
+him presently, for he looked genial enough to be asked to hold a
+baby.  King himself did not seem surprised at all.  Far from it;
+he looked pleased.
+
+"Excuse me, sir," said the man in glib babu English.  "I am seeking
+Captain King sahib, for whom my brother is veree anxious to be servant.
+Can you kindlee tell me, sir, where I could find Captain King sahib?"
+
+"Certainly," King answered him.  He looked glad to be of help.  "Are
+you traveling on this train?"
+
+The question sounded like politeness welling from the lips of unsuspicion.
+
+"Yes, sir.  I am traveling from this place where I have spent a few
+days, to Bombay, where my business is.
+
+"How did you know King sahib is on the train?" King asked him,
+smiling so genially that even the police could not have charged
+him with more than curiosity.
+
+"By telegram, sir.  My brother had the misfortune to miss Captain
+King sahib at Peshawur and therefore sent a telegram to me asking
+me to do what I can at an interview."
+
+"I see," said King. "I see."  And judging by the sparkle in his
+eyes as he looked away he could see a lot.  But the native could
+not see his eyes at that instant, although he tried to.
+
+He looked back at the train, giving the man a good chance to study
+his face in profile.
+ 
+"Oh, thank you, sir!" said the native oilily.  "You are most kind!
+I am your humble servant, sir!"
+
+King nodded good-by to him, his dark eyes in the shadow of the
+khaki helmet seeming scarcely interested any longer.
+
+"Couldn't you find another berth?" Hyde asked him angrily when he
+stepped back into the compartment.
+
+"What were you out there looking for?"
+
+King smiled back at him blandly.
+
+"I think there are railway thieves on the train," he announced
+without any effort at relevance.  He might not have heard the question.
+
+"What makes you think so?"
+
+"Observation, sir."
+ 
+"Oh!  Then if you've seen thieves, why didn't you have 'em arrested?
+You were precious free with that authority of yours on Peshawur platform!"
+
+"Perhaps You'd care to take the responsibility, sir?  Let me point
+out one of them."
+
+Full of grudging curiosity Hyde came to stand by him, and King
+stepped back just as the train began to move.
+
+"That man, sir--over there--no, beyond him--there!"
+
+Hyde thrust head and shoulders through the window, and a well-dressed
+native with one foot on the running-board at the back end of the
+train took a long steady stare at him before jumping in and slamming
+the door of a third-class carriage.
+
+"Which one?" demanded Hyde impatiently.
+
+"I don't see him now, sir!"
+
+Hyde snorted and returned to his seat in the silence of unspeakable
+scorn.  But presently he opened a suitcase and drew out a repeating
+pistol which he cocked carefully and stowed beneath his pillow;
+not at all a contemptible move, because the Indian railway thief
+is the most resourceful specialist in the world.  But King took
+no overt precautions of any kind.
+
+After more interminable hours night shut down on them, red-hot,
+black-dark, mesmerically subdivided into seconds by the thump of
+carriage wheels and lit at intervals by showers of sparks from the
+gasping engine.  The din of Babel rode behind the first-class carriages,
+for all the natives in the packed third-class talked all together.
+(In India, when one has spent a fortune on a third-class ticket,
+one proceeds to enjoy the ride.)  The train was a Beast out of
+Revelation, wallowing in noise.
+
+But after other, hotter hours the talking ceased.  Then King,
+strangely without kicking off his shoes, drew a sheet up over his
+shoulders.  On the opposite berth Hyde covered his head, to keep
+dust out of his hair, and presently King heard him begin to snore
+gently.  Then, very carefully he adjusted his own position so that
+his profile lay outlined in the dim light from the gas lamp in the
+roof.  He might almost have been waiting to be shaved.
+
+The stuffiness increased to a degree that is sometimes preached
+in Christian churches as belonging to a sulphurous sphere beyond
+the grave.  Yet he did not move a muscle.  It was long after midnight
+when his vigil was rewarded by a slight sound at the door.  From
+that instant his eyes were on the watch, under dark of closed lashes;
+but his even breathing was that of the seventh stage of sleep that
+knows no dreams.
+
+A click of the door-latch heralded the appearance of a hand.  With
+skill, of the sort that only special training can develop, a man
+in native dress insinuated himself into the carriage without making
+another sound of any kind.  King's ears are part of the equipment
+for his exacting business, but he could not hear the door click
+shut again.
+
+For about five minutes, while the train swayed head-long into Indian
+darkness, the man stood listening and watching King's face.  He
+stood so near that King recognized him for the one who had accosted
+him on Rawal-Pindi platform.  And he could see the outline of the
+knife-hilt that the man's fingers clutched underneath his shirt.
+
+"He'll either strike first, so as to kill us both and do the looting
+afterward--and in that case I think it will be easier to break his
+neck than his arm--yes, decidedly his neck;  it's long and thin;--or--"
+
+His eyes feigned sleep so successfully that the native turned away
+at last.
+
+"Thought so!"  He dared open his eyes a mite wider.  "He's pukka--
+true to type!  Rob first and then kill!  Rule number one with his
+sort,  run when you've stabbed!  Not a bad rule either, from their
+point of view!"
+
+As he watched, the thief drew the sheet back from Hyde's face, with
+trained fingers that could have taken spectacles from the victims'
+nose without his knowledge.  Then as fish glide in and out among
+the reeds without touching them, swift and soft and unseen, his
+fingers searched Hyde's body.  They found nothing.  So they dived
+under the pillow and brought out the pistol and a gold watch.
+
+After that he began to search the clothes that hung on a hook beside
+Hyde's berth.  He brought forth papers and a pocketbook--then money.
+Money went into one bag--papers and pocketbook into another.  And
+that was evidence enough as well as risk enough.  The knife would
+be due in a minute.
+
+King moved in his sleep, rather noisily, and the movement knocked
+a book to the floor from the foot of his berth.  The noise of that
+awoke Hyde, and King pretended to begin to wake, yawning and rolling
+on his back (that being much the safest position an unarmed man
+can take and much the most awkward for his enemy).
+
+"Thieves!"  Hyde yelled at the top of his lungs, groping wildly
+for his pistol and not finding it.
+
+King sat up and rubbed his eyes.  The native drew the knife, and--
+believing himself in command of the situation--hesitated for one
+priceless second.  He saw his error and darted for the door too late.
+With a movement unbelievably swift King was there ahead of him;
+and with another movement not so swift, but much more disconcerting,
+he threw his sheet as the retiarius used to throw a net in ancient
+Rome.  It wrapped round the native's head and arms, and the two
+went together to the floor in a twisted stranglehold.
+
+In another half-minute the native was groaning, for King had his
+knife-wrist in two hands and was bending it backward while he pressed
+the man's stomach with his knees.
+
+"Get his loot!" he panted between efforts.
+
+The knife fell to the floor, and the thief made a gallant effort
+to recover it, but King was too strong for him.  He seized the knife
+himself, slipped it in his  own bosom and resumed his hold before
+the native guessed what he was after.         Then he kept a tight grip
+while Hyde knelt to grope for his missing property.  The major found
+both the thief's bags, and held them up.
+
+"I expect that's all," said King, loosening his grip very gradually.
+The native noticed--as Hyde did not--that King had begun to seem
+almost absent-minded;  the thief lay quite still, looking up, trying
+to divine his next intention.  Suddenly the brakes went on, but
+King's grip did not tighten.  The train began to scream itself to
+a standstill at a wayside station, and King (the absent-minded--very
+nearly grinned.
+
+"If I weren't in such an infernal hurry to reach Bombay--" Hyde
+grumbled;  and King nearly laughed aloud then, for the thief knew
+English, and was listening with all his ears, "--may I be damned
+if I wouldn't get off at this station and wait to see that scoundrel
+brought to justice!"
+
+The train jerked itself to a standstill, and a man with a lantern
+began to chant the station's name.
+ 
+"Damn it!--I'm going to Bombay to act censor.  I can't wait--they
+want me there."
+
+The instant the train's motion altogether ceased the heat shut in
+on them as if the lid of Tophet had been slammed.  The prickly beat
+burst out all over Hyde's skin and King's too.
+
+"Almighty God!" gasped Hyde, beginning to fan himself.
+
+There was plenty of excuse for relaxing hold still further, and
+King made full use of it.  A second later be gave a very good
+pretense of pain in his finger-ends as the thief burst free.  The
+native made a dive at his bosom for the knife, but he frustrated
+that.  Then he made a prodigious effort, just too late, to clutch
+the man again, and he did succeed in tearing loose a piece of shirt;
+but the fleeing robber must have wondered, as he bolted into the
+blacker shadows of the station building, why such an iron-fingered,
+wide-awake sahib should have made such a truly feeble showing at
+the end.
+
+"Damn it!--couldn't you hold him?  Were you afraid of him, or what?"
+demanded Hyde, beginning to dress himself.  Instead of answering,
+King leaned out into the lamp-lit gloom, and in a minute he caught
+sight of a sergeant of native infantry passing down the train.  He
+made a sign that brought the man to him on the run.
+
+"Did you see that runaway?" he asked.
+
+"Ha, sahib.  I saw one running.  Shall I follow?"
+
+"No.  This piece of his shirt will identify him.  Take it.  Hide it!
+When a man with a torn shirt, into which that piece fits, makes for
+the telegraph office after this train has gone on, see that he is
+allowed to send any telegrams he wants to!  Only, have copies of
+every one of them wired to Captain King, care of the station-master,
+Delhi.  Have you understood?"
+
+"Ha, sahib."
+
+"Grab him, and lock him up tight afterward--but not until he has
+sent his telegrams!'
+
+"Atcha, sahib."
+
+"Make yourself scarce, then!"
+
+Major Hyde was dressed, having performed that military evolution
+in something less than record time.
+
+"Who was that you were talking to?" he demanded.  But King continued
+to look out the door.
+
+Hyde came and tapped on his shoulder impatiently, but King did not
+seem to understand until the native sergeant had quite vanished
+into the shadows.
+
+"Let me pass, will you!" Hyde demanded.  "I'll have that thief
+caught if the train has to wait a week while they do it!"
+
+He pushed past, but he was scarcely on the step when the station-
+master blew his whistle, and his colored minion waved a lantern back
+and forth.  The engine shrieked forthwith of death and torment;
+carriage doors slammed shut in staccato series;  the heat relaxed
+as the engine moved--loosened--let go--lifted at last, and a trainload
+of hot passengers sighed thanks to an unresponsive sky as the train
+gained speed and wind crept in through the thermantidotes.
+
+Only through the broken thermantidote in King's compartment no wet
+air came.  Hyde knelt on King's berth and wrestled with it like a
+caged animal, but with no result except that the sweat poured out
+all over him and he was more uncomfortable than before.
+ 
+"What are you looking at?" he demanded at last, sitting on King's
+berth.  His head swam.  He had to wait a few seconds before he could
+step across to his own side.
+
+"Only a knife," said King.  He was standing under the dim gas lamp
+that helped make the darkness more unbearable.
+
+"Not that robber's knife?  Did he drop it?"
+
+"It's my knife," said King.
+
+"Strange time to stand staring at it, if it's yours!  Didn't you
+ever see it before?"
+
+King stowed the knife away in his bosom, and the major crossed to
+his own side.
+
+"I'm thinking I'll know it again, at all events!" King answered,
+sitting down.  "Good night, sir."
+
+"Good night."
+
+Within ten minutes Hyde was asleep, snoring prodigiously.  Then
+King pulled out the knife again and studied it for half an hour.
+The blade was of bronze, with an edge hammered to the keenness of a
+razor.  The hilt was of nearly pure gold, in the form of a woman dancing.
+
+The whole thing was so exquisitely wrought that age had only softened
+the lines, without in the least impairing them.  It looked like
+one of those Grecian toys with which Roman women of Nero's day
+stabbed their lovers.  But that was not why he began to whistle
+very softly to himself.
+
+Presently he drew out the general's package of papers, with the
+photograph on the top.  He stood up, to hold both knife and papers
+close to the light in the roof.
+
+It needed no great stretch of imagination to suggest a likeness
+between the woman of the photograph and the other, of the golden
+knife-hilt.  And nobody, looking at him then, would have dared
+suggest he lacked imagination.
+
+If the knife had not been so ancient they might have been portraits
+of the same woman, in the same disguise, taken at the same time.
+
+"She knew I had been chosen to work with her.  The general sent
+her word that I am coming,"  he muttered to himself.  "Man number
+one had a try for me, but I had him pinched too soon.  There must
+have been a spy watching at Peshawur, who wired to Rawal-Pindi for
+this man to jump the train and go on with the job.  She must have
+had him planted at Rawal-Pindi in case of accidents.  She seems
+thorough!  Why should she give the man a knife with her own portrait
+on it?  Is she queen of a secret society?  Well--we shall see!"
+
+He sat down on his berth again and sighed, not discontentedly.
+Then he lit one of his great black cigars and blew rings for five
+or six minutes.  Then he lay back with his head on the pillow, and
+before five minutes more had gone he was asleep, with the cold
+cigar still clutched between his fingers.
+
+He looked as interesting in his sleep as when awake.  His mobile
+face in repose looked Roman, for the sun had tanned his skin and
+his nose was aquiline.  In museums, where sculptured heads of Roman
+generals and emperors stand around the wall on pedestals, it would
+not be difficult to pick several that bore more than a faint
+resemblance to him.  He had breadth and depth of forehead and a
+jowl that lent itself to smiles as well as sternness, and a throat
+that expressed manly determination in every molded line.
+
+He slept like a boy until dawn;  and he and Hyde had scarcely
+exchanged another dozen words when the train screamed next day into
+Delhi station.  Then he saluted stiffly and was gone.
+
+"Young jackanapes!" Hyde muttered after him.  "Lazy young devil!
+He ought to be with his regiment, marching and setting a good example
+to his men!  We'll have our work cut out to win this war, if there
+are many of his stamp!  And I'm afraid there are--I'm afraid so--
+far too many of 'em!  Pity!  Such a pity!  If the right men were
+at the top the youngsters at the foot of the ladder would mind their
+P's and Q's.  As it is, I'm afraid we shall get beaten in this show.
+Dear, oh, dear!"
+
+Being what he was, and consistent before all things, Major Hyde
+drew out his writing materials there and then and wrote a report
+against Athelstan King, which he signed, addressed to headquarters
+and mailed at the first opportunity. There some future historian
+may find it and draw from it unkind deductions on the morale of
+the British army.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+
+
+The only things which can not be explained are facts.  So, use 'em.
+A riddle is proof there is a key to it.  Nor is it a riddle when
+you've got the key.
+Life is as simple as all that. --Cocker
+
+
+Delhi boasts a round half-dozen railway stations, all of them
+designed with regard to war, so that to King there was nothing
+unexpected in the fact that the train had brought him to an
+unexpected station.  He plunged into its crowd much as a man in
+the mood might plunge into a whirlpool,--laughing as he plunged,
+for it was the most intoxicating splurge of color, din and smell
+that even India, the many-peopled--even Delhi, mother of dynasties--
+ever had, evolved.
+
+The station echoed--reverberated--hummed.  A roar went up of human
+voices, babbling in twenty tongues, and above that rose in differing
+degrees the ear-splitting shriek of locomotives, the blare of bugles,
+the neigh of led horses, the bray of mules, the jingle of gun-chains
+and the thundering cadence of drilled feet.
+
+At one minute the whole building shook to the thunder of a grinning
+regiment;  an instant later it clattered to the wrought-steel hammer
+of a thousand hoofs, as led troop-horses danced into formation to
+invade the waiting trucks.  Loaded trucks banged into one another
+and thunderclapped their way into the sidings.  And soldiers of
+nearly every Indian military caste stood about everywhere, in what
+was picturesque confusion to the uninitiated, yet like the letters
+of an index to a man who knew.  And King knew.  Down the back of
+each platform Tommy Atkins stood in long straight lines, talking
+or munching great sandwiches or smoking.
+
+The heat smelt and felt of another world.  The din was from the
+same sphere.  Yet everywhere was hope and geniality and by-your-
+leave as if weddings were in the wind and not the overture to death.
+
+Threading his way in and out among the motley swarm with a great
+black cheroot between his teeth and sweat running into his eyes
+from his helmet-band, Athelstan King strode at ease--at home--intent--
+amused--awake--and almost awfully happy.  He was not in the least
+less happy because perfectly aware that a native was following him
+at a distance, although he did wonder how the native had contrived
+to pass within the lines.
+
+The general at Peshawur had compressed about a ton of miscellaneous
+information into fifteen hurried minutes, but mostly he had given
+him leave and orders to inform himself;  so the fun was under way
+of winning exact knowledge in spite of officers, not one of whom
+would not have grown instantly suspicions at the first asked question.
+At the end of fifteen minutes there was not a glib staff-officer
+there who could have deceived him as to the numbers and destination
+of the force entraining.
+
+"Kerachi!" he told himself, chewing the butt of his cigar and keeping
+well ahead of the shadowing native.  Always keep a "shadow" moving
+until you're ready to deal with him is one of Cocker's very
+soundest rules.
+
+"Turkey hasn't taken a hand yet--the general said so.  No holy war
+yet.  These'll be held in readiness to cross to Basra in case the
+Turks begin.  While they wait for that at Kerachi the tribes won't
+dare begin anything.  One or two spies are sure to break North and
+tell them what this force is for--but the tribes won't believe.
+They'll wait until the force has moved to Basra before they take
+chances.  Good!  That means no especial hurry for me!"
+
+He did not have to return salutes, because he did not look for them.
+Very few people noticed him at all, although he was recognized once
+or twice by former messmates, and one officer stopped him with an
+out-stretched hand.
+
+"Shake hands, you old tramp!  Where are you bound for next?  Tibet
+by any chance--or is it Samarkand this time?"
+
+"Oh, hullo, Carmichel!" he answered, beaming instant good-fellowship.
+"Where are you bound for?"  And the other did not notice that his
+own question had not been answered.
+
+"Bombay!  Bombay--Marseilles--Brussels--Berlin!"
+
+"Wish you luck!" laughed King, passing on.  Every living man there,
+with the exception of a few staff-officers, believed himself en
+route for Europe;  their faces said as much.  Yet King took another
+look at the piles of stores and at the kits the men carried.
+
+"Who'd take all that stuff to Europe, where they make it?" he
+reflected.  "And what 'u'd they use camel harness for in France?"
+
+At his leisure--in his own way, that was devious and like a string
+of miracles--he filtered toward the telegraph office.  The native
+who had followed him all this time drew closer, but he did not let
+himself be troubled by that.
+
+He whispered proof of his identity to the telegraph clerk, who was
+a Royal Engineer, new to that job that morning, and a sealed telegram
+was handed to him at once.  The "shadow" came very close indeed,
+presumably to try and read over his shoulder from behind, but he
+side-stepped into a corner and read the telegram with his back to
+the wall.
+
+It was in English, no doubt to escape suspicion;  and because it
+was war-time, and the censorship had closed on India like a
+throttling string, it was not in code.  So the wording, all things
+considered, had to be ingenious, for the Mirza Ali, of the Fort,
+Bombay, to whom it was addressed, could scarcely be expected to
+read more than between the lines.  The lines had to be there to
+read between.
+
+"Cattle intended for slaughter," it ran, "despatched Bombay on
+Fourteen down.  Meet train.  Will be inspected en route, but should
+be dealt with carefully, on arrival.  Cattle inclined to stampede
+owing to bad scare received to North of Delhi.  Take all precautions
+and notify Abdul."  It was signed "Suliman."
+
+"Good!" be chuckled. "Let's hope we get Abdul too.  I wonder who
+he is!"
+
+Still uninterested in the man who shadowed him, he walked back to
+the office window and wrote two telegrams;  one to Bombay, ordering
+the arrest of Ali Mirza of the Fort, with an urgent admonition to
+discover who his man Abdul might be, and to seize him as soon as
+found;  the other to the station in the north, insisting on dose
+confinement for Suliman.
+
+"Don't let him out on any terms at all!" he wired.
+
+That being all the urgent business, he turned leisurely to face
+his shadow, and the native met his eyes with the engaging frankness
+of an old friend, coming forward with outstretched hand.  They did
+not shake hands, for King knew better than to fall into the first
+trap offered him.  But the man made a signal with his fingers that
+is known to not more than a dozen men in all the world, and that
+changed the situation altogether.
+
+"Walk with me," said King, and the man fell into stride beside him.
+
+He was a Rangar,--which is to say a Rajput who, or whose ancestors
+had turned Muhammadan.  Like many Rajputs he was not a big man,
+but be looked fit and wiry;  his head scarcely came above the level
+of King's chin, although his turban distracted attention from the
+fact.  The turban was of silk and unusually large.
+
+The whitest of well-kept teeth, gleaming regularly under a little
+black waxed mustache betrayed no trace of betel-nut or other nastiness,
+and neither his fine features nor his eyes suggested vice of the
+sort that often undermines the character of Rajput youth.
+
+On second thoughts, and at the next opportunity to see them, King
+was not so sure that the eyes were brown, and he changed his opinion
+about their color a dozen times within the hour.  Once be would
+even have sworn they were green.
+
+The man was well-to-do, for his turban was of costly silk, and he
+was clad in expensive jodpur riding breeches and spurred black
+riding boots, all perfectly immaculate.  The breeches, baggy above
+and tight, below, suggested the clean lines of cat-like agility
+and strength.
+
+The upper part of his costume was semi-European.  He was a regular
+Rangar dandy, of the type that can be seen playing polo almost any
+day at Mount Abu--that gets into mischief with a grace due to
+practise and heredity--but that does not manage its estates too well,
+as a rule, nor pay its debts in a hurry.
+
+"My name is Rewa Gunga," he said in a low voice, looking up sidewise
+at King a shade too guilelessly.  Between Cape Comorin and the
+Northern Ice guile is normal, and its absence makes the wise suspicious.
+
+"I am Captain King."
+
+"I have a message for you."
+
+"From whom?"
+
+"From her!" said the Rangar, and without exactly knowing why, or
+being pleased with himself, King felt excited.
+
+They were walking toward the station exit.  King had a trunk check
+in his hand, but returned it to pocket, not proposing just yet to let
+this Rangar over--hear instructions regarding the trunk's destination;
+he was too good-looking and too overbrimming with personal charm to
+be trusted thus early in the game.  Besides, there was that captured
+knife, that hinted at lies and treachery.  Secret signs as well as
+loot have been stolen before now.
+
+"I'd like to walk through the streets and see the crowd."
+
+He smiled as he said that, knowing well that the average young Rajput
+of good birth would rather fight a tiger with cold steel than walk
+a mile or two.  He drew fire at once.
+
+"Why walk, King sahib?  Are we animals?  There is a carriage waiting--
+her carriage--and a coachman whose ears were born dead.  We might
+be overheard in the street.  Are you and I children, tossing stones
+into a pool to watch the rings widen!"
+
+"Lead on, then," answered King.
+
+Outside the station was a luxuriously modern victoria, with C springs
+and rubber tires, with horses that would have done credit to a viceroy.
+The Rangar motioned King to get in first, and the moment they were
+both seated the Rajput coachman set the horses to going like the wind.
+Rewa Gunga opened a jeweled cigarette case.
+
+"Will you have one?" he asked with the air of royalty entertaining
+a blood-equal.
+
+King accepted a cigarette for politeness' sake and took occasion
+to admire the man's slender wrist, that was doubtless hard and strong
+as woven steel, but was not much more than half the thickness of
+his own.
+
+The Rajputs as a race are proud of their wrists and hands.  Their
+swords are made with a hilt so small that none save a Rajput of
+the blood could possibly use one;  yet there is no race in all
+warring India, nor any in the world, that bears a finer record for
+hard fighting and sheer derring-do.  One of the questions that
+occurred to King that minute was why this well-bred youngster whose
+age he guessed at twenty-two or so had not turned his attention
+to the army.
+
+"My height!"
+
+The man had read his thoughts!
+
+"Not quite tall enough.  Besides--you are a soldier, are you not?
+And do you fight?"
+
+He nodded toward a dozen water-buffaloes, that slouched along the
+street with wet goatskin mussuks slung on their blue flanks.
+
+"They can fight," he said smiling.  "So can any other fool!"  Then,
+after a minute of rather strained silence:  "My message is from her."
+
+"From Yasmini?"
+
+"Who else?"
+
+King accepted the rebuke with a little inclination of the head.
+He spoke as little as possible, because he was puzzled.  He had
+become conscious of a puzzled look in the Rangar's eyes--of a subtle
+wonderment that might be intentional flattery (for Art and the East
+are one).  Whenever the East is doubtful, and recognizes doubt,
+it is as dangerous as a hillside in the rains, and it only added
+to his problem if the Rangar found in him something inexplicable. The
+West can only get the better of the East when the East is too cock-sure.
+
+"She has jolly well gone North!" said the Rangar suddenly, and King
+shut his teeth with a snap.  He sat bolt upright, and the Rangar
+allowed himself to look amused.
+
+"When?  Why?"
+
+"She was too jolly well excited to wait, sahib!  She is of the North,
+you know.  She loves the North, and the men of the 'Hills';  and
+she knows them because she loves them.  There came a tar (telegram)
+from Peshawur, from a general, to say King sahib comes to Delhi;
+but already she had completed all arrangements here.  She was in
+a great stew, I can assure you.  Finally she said, 'Why should I
+wait?' Nobody could answer her."
+
+He spoke English well enough.  Few educated foreign gentlemen could
+have spoken it better, although there was the tendency to use slang
+that well-bred natives insist on picking up from British officers;
+and as he went on, here and there the native idiom crept through,
+translated.  King said nothing, but listened and watched, puzzled
+more than he would have cared to admit by the look in the Rangar's
+eyes.  It was not suspicion--nor respect.  Yet there was a suggestion
+of both.
+
+"At last she said, 'It is well; I will not wait!  I know of this
+sahib. He is a man whose feet stand under him and he will not tread
+my growing flowers into garbage!  He will be clever enough to pick
+up the end of the thread that I shall leave behind and follow it
+and me!  He is a true bound, with a nose that reads the wind, or
+the general sahib never would have sent him!'  So she left me behind,
+sahib, to--to present to you the end of the thread of which she spoke."
+
+King tossed away the stump of the cigarette and rolled his tongue
+round the butt of a fresh cheroot.  The word "hound" is not
+necessarily a compliment in any of a thousand Eastern tongues and
+gains little by translation.  It might have been a slip, but the
+East takes advantage of its own slips as well as of other peoples'
+unless watched.
+
+The carriage swayed at high speed round three sharp corners in
+succession before the Rangar spoke again.
+
+"She has often heard of you," he said then.  That was not unlikely,
+but not necessarily true either.  If it were true, it did not help
+to account for the puzzled look in the Rangar's eyes, that increased
+rather than diminished.
+
+"I've heard of her," said King.
+
+"Of course!  Who has not?  She has desired to meet you, sahib, ever
+since she was told you are the best man in your service."
+
+King grunted, thinking of the knife beneath his shirt.
+
+"She is very glad that you and she are on the same errand."  He
+leaned forward for the sake of emphasis and laid a finger on King's
+hand.  It was a delicate, dainty finger with an almond nail.  "She
+is very glad.  She is far more glad than you imagine, or than you
+would believe.  King sahib, she is all bucked up about it!  Listen--
+her web is wide!  Her agents are here--there--everywhere, and she
+is obeyed as few kings have ever been!  Those agents shall all be
+held answerable for your life, sahib,--for she has said so!  They
+are one and all your bodyguard, from now forward!"
+
+King inclined his head politely, but the weight of the knife inside
+his shirt did not encourage credulity.  True, it might not be Yasmini's
+knife, and the Rangar's emphatic assurance might not be an
+unintentional admission that the man who had tried to use it was
+Yasmini's man.  But when a man has formed the habit of deduction,
+he deduces as he goes along, and is prone to believe what his
+instinct tells him.
+
+Again, it was as if the Rangar read a part of his thoughts, if not
+all of them.  It is not difficult to counter that trick, but to
+do it a man must be on his guard, or the East will know what he
+has thought and what he is going to think, as many have discovered
+when it was too late.
+
+"Her men are able to protect anybody's life from any God's number
+of assassins, whatever may lead you to think the contrary.  From
+now forward your life is in her men's keeping!"
+
+"Very good of her;  I'm sure," King murmured.  He was thinking of
+the general's express order to apply for a "passport" that would
+take him into Khinjan Caves--mentally cursing the necessity for
+asking any kind of favor,--and wondering whether to ask this man
+for it or wait until he should meet Yasmini.  He had about made up
+his mind that to wait would be quite within a strict interpretation
+of his orders, as well as infinitely more agreeable to himself,
+when the Rangar answered his thoughts again as if he had spoken
+them aloud.
+
+"She left this with me, saying I am to give it to you!  I am to
+say that wherever you wear it, between here and Afghanistan, your
+life shall be safe and you may come and go!"
+
+King stared.  The Rangar drew a bracelet from an inner pocket and
+held it out.  It was a wonderful, barbaric thing of pure gold, big
+enough for a grown man's wrist, and old enough to have been hammered
+out in the very womb of time.  It looked almost like ancient Greek,
+and it fastened with a hinge and clasp that looked as if they did
+not belong to it, and might have been made by a not very skillful
+modern jeweler.
+
+"Won't you wear it?" asked Rewa Gunga, watching him.  "It will prove
+a true talisman!  What was the name of the Johnny who had a lamp
+to rub?  Aladdin?  It will be better than what he had!  He could
+only command a lot of bogies.  This will give you authority over
+flesh and blood!  Take it, sahib!"
+
+So King put it on, letting it slip up his sleeve, out of sight,--
+with a sensation as the snap closed of putting handcuffs on himself.
+But the Rangar looked relieved.
+
+"That is your passport, sahib!  Show it to a Hill-man whenever you
+suppose yourself in danger.  The Raj might go to pieces, but while
+Yasmini lives--"
+
+"Her friends will boast about her, I suppose!"
+
+King finished the sentence for him because it is considered good
+form for natives to hint at possible dissolution of the Anglo-Indian
+Government.  Everybody knows that the British will not govern India
+forever, but the British--who know it best of all, and work to that
+end most fervently--are the only ones encouraged to talk about it.
+
+For a few minutes after that Rewa Gunga held his peace, while the
+carriage swayed at breakneck speed through the swarming streets.
+They had to drive slower in the Chandni Chowk, for the ancient
+Street of the Silversmiths that is now the mart of Delhi was ablaze
+with crude colors, and was thronged with more people than ever since
+'57.  There were a thousand signs worth studying by a man who could
+read them.
+
+King, watching and saying nothing, reached the conclusion that Delhi
+was in hand--excited undoubtedly, more than a bit bewildered, watchful,
+but in hand.  Without exactly knowing how he did it, he grew aware
+of a certain confidence that underlay the surface fuss.  After that
+the sea of changing patterns and raised voices ceased to have any
+particular interest for him and he lay back against the cushions
+to pay stricter attention to his own immediate affairs.
+
+He did not believe for a second the lame explanation Yasmini had
+left behind.  She must have some good reason for wishing to be
+first up the Khyber, and he was very sorry indeed she had slipped
+away.  It might be only jealousy, yet why should she be jealous?
+It might be fear--yet why should she be afraid?
+
+It was the next remark of the Rangar's that set him entirely on
+his guard, and thenceforward whoever could have read his thoughts
+would have been more than human.  Perhaps it is the most dominant
+characteristic of the British race that it will not defend itself
+until it must.  He had known of that thought-reading trick ever
+since his ayah (native nurse) taught him to lisp Hindustanee;
+just as surely he knew that its impudent, repeated use was intended
+to sap his belief in himself.  There is not much to choose between
+the native impudence that dares intrude on a man's thoughts, and
+the insolence that understands it, and is rather too proud to care.
+
+"I'll bet you a hundred dibs," said the Rangar, "that she jolly
+well didn't fancy your being on the scene ahead of her!  I'll bet
+you she decided to be there first and get control of the situation!
+Take me?  You'd lose if you did!  She's slippery, and quick, and
+like all Women, she's jealous!"
+
+The Rangar's eyes were on his, but King was not to be caught again.
+It is quite easy to think behind a fence, so to speak, if one gives
+attention to it.
+
+"She will be busy presently fooling those Afridis," he continued,
+waving his cigarette.  "She has fooled them always, to the limit
+of their bally bent.  They all believe she is their best friend
+in the world--oh, dear Yes, you bet they do!  And so she is--so
+she is--but not in the way they think!  They believe she plots
+with them against the Raj!  Poor silly devils!  Yet Yasmini loves
+them!  They want war--blood--loot!  It is all they think about!
+They are seldom satisfied unless their wrists and elbows are bally
+well red with other peoples' gore!  And while they are picturing
+the loot, and the slaughter of unbelievers--(as if they believed
+anything but foolishness themselves!)--Yasmini plays her own game,
+for amusement and power--a good game--a deep game!  You have seen
+already how India has to ask her aid in the 'Hills'!  She loves
+power, power, power--not for its name, for names are nothing, but
+to use it.  She loves the feel of it!  Fighting is not power!
+Blood-letting is foolishness.  If there is any blood spilt it is
+none of her doing--unless--"
+
+"Unless what?" asked King.
+
+"Oh--sometimes there were fools who interfered.  You can not blame
+her for that."
+
+"You seem to be a champion of hers!  How long have you known her?"'
+
+The Rangar eyed him sharply.
+
+"A long time.  She and I played together when we were children.
+I know her whole history--and that is something nobody else in the
+world knows but she herself.  You see, I am favored.  It is because
+she knows me very well that she chose me to travel North with you,
+when you start to find her in the 'Hills'!"
+
+King cleared his throat, and the Rangar nodded, looking into his
+eyes with the engaging confidence of a child who never has been
+refused anything, in or out of reason.  King made no effort to look
+pleased, so the Rangar drew on his resources.
+
+"I have a letter from her," he stated blandly.
+
+From a pocket in the carriage cushions he brought out a silver tube,
+richly carved in the Kashmiri style and closed at either end with
+a tightly fitting silver cap.  King accepted it and drew the cap
+from one end.  A roll of scented paper fell on his lap, and a puff
+of hot wind combined with a lurch of the carriage springs came near
+to lose it for him;  he snatched it just in time and unrolled it
+to find a letter written to himself in Urdu, in a beautiful
+flowing hand.
+
+Urdu is perhaps the politest of written tongues and lends itself
+most readily to indirectness;  but since he did not expect to read
+a catalogue of exact facts, he was not disappointed.
+
+Translated, the letter ran:
+
+        "To Athelstan King sahib, by the hand of Rewa Gunga.
+        Greeting.  The bearer is my well-trusted servant, whom
+        I have chosen to be the sahib's guide until Heaven
+        shall be propitious and we meet.  He is instructed
+        in all that he need know concerning what is now in hand,
+        and he will tell by word of mouth such things as ought
+        not to be written.  By all means let Rewa Gunga travel
+        with you, for he is of royal blood, of the House of
+        Ketchwaha and will not fail you.  His honor and mine
+        are one.  Praying that the many gods of India may heap
+        honors on your honor's head, providing each his proper
+        attribute toward entire ability to succeed in all things,
+        but especially in the present undertaking,
+
+        "I am Your Excellency's humble servant,
+        --Yasmini."
+
+He had barely finished reading it when the coachman took a last
+corner at a gallop and drew the horses up on their haunches at a
+door in a high white wall.  Rewa Gunga sprang out of the carriage
+before the horses were quite at a standstill.
+
+"Here we are!" he said, and King, gathering up the letter and the
+silver tube, noticed that the street curved here so that no other
+door and no window overlooked this one.
+
+He followed the Rangar, and he was no sooner into the shadow of
+the door than the coachman lashed the horses and the carriage swung
+out of view.
+
+"This way," said the Rangar over his shoulder.  "Come!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+
+Lie to a liar, for lies are his coin.
+Steal from a thief, for that is easy.
+Set a trap for a trickster, and catch him at the first attempt.
+But beware of the man who has no axe to grind.
+--Eastern Proverb
+
+
+It was a musty smelling entrance, so dark that to see was scarcely
+possible after the hot glare outside.  Dimly King made out Rewa
+Gunga mounting stairs to the left and followed him.  The stairs
+wound backward and forward on themselves four times, growing scarcely
+any lighter as they ascended, until, when he guessed himself two
+stories at least above road level, there was a sudden blaze of
+reflected light and he blinked at more mirrors than he could count.
+They had been swung on hinges suddenly to throw the light full in
+his face.
+
+There were curtains reflected in each mirror, and little glowing
+lamps, so cunningly arranged that it was not possible to guess
+which were real and which were not.  Rewa Gunga offered no
+explanation, but stood watching with quiet amusement.  He seemed
+to expect King to take a chance and go forward, but if he did he
+reckoned without his guest.  King stood still.
+
+Then suddenly, as if she had done it a thousand times before and
+surprised a thousand people, a little nut-brown maid parted the
+middle pair of curtains and said "Salaam!" smiling with teeth that
+were as white as porcelain.  All the other curtains parted too,
+so that the whereabouts of the door might still have been in doubt
+had she not spoken and so distinguished herself from her reflections.
+King looked scarcely interested and not at all disturbed.
+
+Balked of his amusement, Rewa Gunga hurried past him, thrusting
+the little maid aside, and led the way.  King followed him into a
+long room, whose walls were hung with richer silks than any he
+remembered to have seen.  In a great wide window to one side some
+twenty, women began at once to make flute music. 
+
+Silken punkahs swung from chains, wafting back and forth a cloud
+of sandalwood smoke that veiled the whole scene in mysterious,
+scented mist.  Through the open window came the splash of a fountain
+and the chattering of birds, and the branch of a feathery tree
+drooped near by.  It seemed that the long white wall below was that
+of Yasmini's garden.
+
+"Be welcome!" laughed Rewa Gunga;  "I am to do the honors, since
+she is not here.  Be seated, sahib."
+
+King chose a divan at the room's farthest end, near tall curtains
+that led into rooms beyond.  He turned his back toward the reason
+for his choice.  On a little ivory-inlaid ebony table about ten
+feet away lay a knife, that was almost the exact duplicate of the
+one inside his shirt.  Bronze knives of ancient date, with golden
+handles carved to represent a woman dancing, are rare.  The ability
+to seem not to notice incriminating evidence is rarer still--rarest
+of all when under the eyes of a native of India, for cats and hawks
+are dullards by comparison to them.  But King saw the knife, yet
+did not seem to see it.
+ 
+There was nothing there calculated to set an Englishman at ease.
+In spite of the Rangar's casual manner, Yasmini's reception room
+felt like the antechamber to another world, where mystery is
+atmosphere and ordinary air to breathe is not at all.  He could
+sense hushed expectancy on every side--could feel the eyes of many
+women fixed on him--and began to draw on his guard as a fighting
+man draws on armor.  There and then he deliberately set himself
+to resist mesmerism, which is the East's chief weapon.
+
+Rewa Gunga, perfectly at home, sprawled leisurely, along a cushioned
+couch with a grace that the West has not learned yet;  but King
+did not make the mistake of trusting him any better for his easy
+manners, and his eyes sought swiftly for some unrhythmic, unplanned
+thing on which to rest, that he might save himself by a sort of
+mental leverage.
+
+Glancing along the wall that faced the big window, he noticed for
+the first time a huge Afridi, who sat on a stool and leaned back
+against the silken hangings with arms folded.
+
+"Who is that man?" he asked.
+
+"He?  Oh, he is a savage--just a big savage," said Rewa Gunga,
+looking vaguely annoyed.
+
+"Why is he here?"
+
+He did not dare let go of this chance side-issue.  He knew that
+Rewa Gunga wished him to talk of Yasmini and to ask questions about
+her, and that if he succumbed to that temptation all his self-
+control would be cunningly sapped away from him until his secrets,
+and his very senses, belonged to some one else.
+
+"What is he doing here?" he insisted.
+
+"He? Oh, he does nothing.  He waits," purred the Rangar.  "He is
+to be your body-servant on your journey to the North.  He is nothing--
+nobody at all!--except that be is to be trusted utterly because
+he loves Yasmini.  He is Obedience!  A big obedient fool!  Let him be!"
+
+"No," said King.  "If he's to be my man I'll speak to him!"
+
+He felt himself winning.  Already the spell of the room was lifting,
+and he no longer felt the cloud of sandalwood smoke like a veil
+across his brain.
+
+"Won't you tell him to come here to me?"
+
+Rewa Gunga laughed, resting his silk turban against the wall hangings
+and clasping both hands about his knee.  It was as a man might laugh
+who has been touched in a bout with foils.
+
+"Oh!--Ismail!" he called, with a voice like a bell, that made King stare.
+
+The Afridi seemed to come out of a deep sleep and looked bewildered,
+rubbing his eyes and feeling whether his turban was on straight.
+He combed his beard with nervous fingers as he gazed about him and
+caught Rewa Gunga's eye.  Then be sprang to his feet.
+
+"Come!" ordered Rewa Gunga.
+
+The man obeyed.
+
+"Did you see?" Rewa Gunga chuckled.  "He rose from his place like
+a buffalo, rump first and then shoulder after shoulder!  Such men
+are safe!  Such men have no guile beyond what will help them to obey!
+Such men think too slowly to invent deceit for its own sake!"
+
+The Afridi came and towered above them, standing with gnarled hands
+knotted into clubs.
+
+"What is thy name?" King asked him.
+ 
+"Ismail!" he boomed.
+
+"Thou art to be my servant?"
+
+"Aye!  So said she.  I am her man.  I obey!"
+
+"When did she say so?" King asked him blandly, asking unexpected
+questions being half the art of Secret Service, although the other
+half is harder to achieve.
+
+The Hillman stroked his great beard and stood considering the question.
+One could almost imagine the click of slow machinery revolving in
+his mind, although King entertained a shrewd suspicion that he was
+not so stupid as he chose to seem.  His eyes were too hawk-bright
+to be a stupid man's.
+
+"Before she went away," he answered at last.
+
+"When did she go away?"
+
+He thought again, then "Yesterday," he said.
+
+"Why did you wait before you answered?"
+
+The Afridi's eyes furtively sought Rewa Gunga's and found no aid
+there.  Watching the Rangar less furtively, but even less obviously,
+King was aware that his eyes were nearly closed, as if they were
+not interested.  The fingers that clasped his knee drummed on it
+indifferently, seeing which King allowed himself to smile.
+
+"Never mind," he told Ismail.  "It is no matter.  It is ever well
+to think twice before speaking once, for thus mistakes die stillborn.
+Only the monkey-folk thrive on quick answers--is it not so?  Thou
+art a man of many inches--of thew and sinew--Hey, but thou art a man!
+If the heart within those great ribs of thine is true as thine arms
+are strong I shall be fortunate to have thee for a servant!"
+
+"Aye!" said the Afridi.  "But what are words?  She has said I am
+thy servant, and to hear her is to obey!"
+
+"Then from now thou art my servant?"
+
+"Nay, but from yesterday when she gave the order!"
+
+"Good!" said King.
+
+"Aye, good for thee!  May Allah do more to me if I fail!"
+
+"Then, take me a telegram!" said King.
+
+He began to write at once on a half-sheet of paper that he tore
+from a letter he had in his pocket, setting down a row of figures
+at the top and transposing into cypher as he went along.
+
+"Yasmini has gone North. Is there any reason at your end why I
+should not follow her at once?"
+
+He addressed it in plain English to his friend the general at
+Peshawur, taking great care lest the Rangar read it through those
+sleepy, half-closed eyes of his.  Then he tore the cypher from the
+top, struck a match and burned the strip of paper and handed the
+code telegram to Ismail, directing him carefully to a government
+office where the cypher signature would be recognized and the
+telegram given precedence.
+
+Ismail stalked off with it, striding like Moses down from Sinai--
+hook-nose--hawk-eye--flowing beard--dignity and all, and King settled
+down to guard himself against the next attempt on his sovereign
+self-command.
+
+Now he chose to notice the knife on the ebony table as if he had
+not seen it before.  He got up and reached for it and brought it
+back, turning it over and over in his hand.
+
+"A strange knife," he said.
+ 
+"Yes,--from Khinjan," said Rewa Gunga, and King eyed him as one
+wolf eyes another.
+ 
+"What makes you say it is from Khinjan?"
+
+"She brought it from Khinjan Caves herself!  There is another knife
+that matches it, but that is not here.  That bracelet you now wear,
+sahib, is from Khinjan Caves too!  She has the secret of the Caves!"
+
+"I have heard that the 'Heart of the Hills' is there," King answered.
+"Is the 'Heart of the Hills' a treasure house?"
+
+Rewa Gunga laughed.
+
+"Ask her, sahib!  Perhaps she will tell you!  Perhaps she will let
+you see!  Who knows?  She is a woman of resource and unexpectedness--
+Let her women dance for you a while."
+
+King nodded.  Then he got up and laid the knife back on the little
+table.  A minute or so later he noticed that at a sign from Rewa
+Gunga a woman left the great window place and spirited the knife away.
+
+"May I have a sheet of paper?" he asked, for he knew that another
+fight for his self-command was due.
+
+Rewa Gunga gave an order, and a maid brought him scented paper on
+a silver tray.  He drew out his own fountain pen then and made ready.
+
+In spite of the great silken punkah that swung rhythmically across
+the full breadth of the room the beat was so great that the pen
+slipped round and round between his fingers.  Yet he contrived to
+write, and since his one object was to give his brain employment,
+he wrote down a list of the names he had memorized in the train on
+the journey from Peshawur, not thinking of a use for the list until
+he had finished.  Then, though, a real use occurred to him.
+
+While he began to write more than a dozen dancing women swept into
+the room from behind the silk hangings in a concerted movement that
+was all lithe slumberous grace.  Wood-wind music called to them
+from the great deep window as snakes are summoned from their holes,
+and as cobras answer the charmer's call the women glided to the
+center and stood poised beneath the punkah.
+
+There they began to chant, still dreamily, and with the chant the
+dance began, in and out, round and round, lazily, ever so lazily,
+wreathed in buoyant gossamer that was scarcely more solid than the
+sandalwood smoke they wafted into rings.
+
+King watched them and listened to their chant until he began to
+recognize the strain on the eye-muscles that precedes the mesmeric
+spell.  Then he wrote and read what he had written and wrote again.
+And after that, for the sake of mental exercise, he switched his
+thoughts into another channel altogether.  He reverted to Delhi
+railway station.
+
+"The Turks can spy as well as anybody.--They know those men are
+going to Kerachi to be ready for them.--Therefore, having cut his
+eye-teeth B.C. several hundred, the Unspeakable Turk will take care
+not to misbehave UNTIL he's ready.  And I suppose our government,
+being ours and we being us, will let him do it!  All of which will
+take time.--And that again means no trouble in the 'Hills--probably--
+until the Turks really do feel ready to begin.  They'll preach a
+holy war just ahead of the date.  The tribes will keep quiet because
+an army at Kerachi might be meant for their benefit.  Oh, yes, I'm
+quite sure they were entraining for Kerachi in readiness to move
+on Basra.
+ 
+Trucks ready for camels--and camel drivers--and food for camels--
+and Eresby, who's just come from taking a special camel course.
+Not a doubt of it!--And then, Corrigan--Elwright--Doby--Gould--all
+on the platform in a bunch, and all down on the Army List as Turkish
+interpreters!  Not a doubt left!"
+
+"What have you written?" asked a quiet voice at his ear;  and he
+turned to look straight in the eyes of Rewa Gunga, who had leaned
+forward to read over his shoulder.  Just for one second he hovered
+on the brink of quick defeat.  Having escaped the Scylla of the
+dancing women, Charybdis waited for him in the shape of eyes that
+were pools of hot mystery.  It was the sound of his own voice that
+brought him back to the world again and saved his will for him unbound.
+
+"Read it, won't you?" he laughed.  "If you know, take this pen and
+mark the names of whichever of those men are still in Delhi."
+
+Rewa Gunga took pen and paper and set a mark against some thirty
+of the names, for King had a manner that disarmed refusal.
+
+"Where are the others?" he asked him, after a glance at it.
+
+"In jail, or else over the border."
+
+"Already?"
+
+The Rangar nodded.  "Trust Yasmini!  She saw to that jolly well
+before she left Delhi! She would have stayed had there been anything
+more to do!"
+
+King began to watch the dance again, for it did not feel safe to
+look too long into the Rangar's eyes.  It was not wise just then
+to look too long at anything, or to think too long on any one subject.
+
+"Ismail is slow about returning," said the Rangar.
+
+"I wrote at the foot of the tar," said King, "that they are to
+detain him there until the answer comes."
+
+The Rangar's eyes blazed for a second and then grew cold again (as
+King did not fail to observe).  He knew as well as the Rangar that
+not many men would have kept their will so unfettered in that room
+as to be able to give independent orders.  He recognized resignation,
+temporary at least, in the Rangar's attitude of leaning back again
+to watch from under lowered eyelids.  It was like being watched by
+a cat.
+
+All this while the women danced on, in time to wailing flute-music,
+until, it seemed from nowhere, a lovelier woman than any of them
+appeared in their midst, sitting cross-legged with a flat basket
+at her knees.  She sat with arms raised and swayed from the waist
+as if in a delirium.  Her arms moved in narrowing circles, higher
+and higher above the basket lid, and the lid began to rise.  Nobody
+touched it, nor was there any string, but as it rose it swayed with
+sickening monotony.
+
+It was minutes before the bodies of two great king-cobras could be
+made out, moving against the woman's spangled dress.  The basket
+lid was resting on their heads, and as the music and the chanting
+rose to a wild weird shriek the lid rose too, until suddenly the
+woman snatched the lid away and the snakes were revealed, with hoods
+raised, hissing the cobra's hate-song that is prelude to the poison-death.
+
+They struck at the woman, one after the other, and she leaped out
+of their range, swift and as supple as they.  Instantly then she
+joined in the dance, with the snakes striking right and left at her.
+Left and right she swayed to avoid them, far more gracefully than
+a matador avoids the bull and courting a deadlier peril than he--
+poisonous, two to his one.  As she danced she whirled both arms above
+her head and cried as the were-wolves are said to do on stormy nights.
+
+Some unseen hand drew a blind over the great window and an eerie
+green-and-golden light began to play from one end of the room,
+throwing the dancers into half-relief and deepening the mystery.
+
+Sweet strange scents were wafted in from under the silken hangings.
+The room grew cooler by unguessed means.  Every sense was treacherously
+wooed.  And ever, in the middle of the moving light among the
+languorous dancers, the snakes pursued the woman!
+
+"Do you do this often?" wondered King, in a calm aside to Rewa Gunga,
+turning half toward him and taking his eyes off the dance without any,
+very, great effort.
+
+Rewa Gunga clapped his hands and the dance ceased.  The woman spirited
+her snakes away.  The blind was drawn upward and in a moment all
+was normal again with the punkah swinging slowly overhead, except
+that the seductive smell remained, that was like the early-morning
+breath of all the different flowers of India.
+
+"If she were here," said the Rangar, a little grimly--with a trace
+of disappointment in his tone--"you would not snatch your eyes away
+like that!  You would have been jolly well transfixed, my friend!
+These--she--that woman--they are but clumsy amateurs!  If she were
+here, to dance with her snakes for you, you would have been jolly
+well dancing with her, if she had wished it!  Perhaps you shall see
+her dance some day!  Ah,--here is Ismail," he added in an altered
+tone of voice.  He seemed relieved at sight of the Afridi.
+
+Bursting through the glass-bead curtains at the door, the great
+savage strode down the room, holding out a telegram.  Rewa Gunga
+looked as if he would have snatched it, but King's hand was held
+out first and Ismail gave it to him.  With a murmur of conventional
+apology King tore the envelope and in a second his eyes were ablaze
+with something more than wonder.  A mystery, added to a mystery,
+stirred all the zeal in him.  But in a second he had sweated his
+excitement down.
+
+"Read that, will you?" he said, passing it to Rewa Gunga.  It was
+not in cypher, but in plain everyday English.
+
+"She has not gone North," it ran.  "She is still in Delhi.  Suit
+your own movements to your plans."
+
+"Can you explain?" asked King in a level voice.  He was watching
+the Rangar narrowly, yet he could not detect the slightest symptom
+of emotion.
+
+"Explain?" said the Rangar.  "Who can explain foolishness?  It means
+that another fat general has made another fat mistake!"
+
+"What makes you so certain she went North?" King asked.
+
+Instead of answering, Rewa Gunga beckoned Ismail, who had stepped
+back out of hearing.  The giant came and loomed over them like the
+Spirit of the Lamp of the Arabian Nights.
+
+"Whither went she?" asked the Rangar.
+
+"To the North!" he boomed.
+
+"How knowest thou?"
+
+"I saw her go!"
+ 
+"When went she?"
+
+"Yesterday, when a telegram came."
+
+The word "came" was the only clue to his meaning, for in the language
+he used "yesterday" and "to-morrow" are the same word;  such is the
+East's estimate of time.
+
+"By what route did she go?" asked Rewa Gunga.
+
+"By the terrain from the station."
+
+"How knowest thou that?"
+
+"I was there, bearing her box of jewels."
+
+"Didst thou see her buy the tikkut?"
+
+"Nay, I bought it, for she ordered me."
+
+"For what destination was the tikkut?"
+
+"Peshawur!" said Ismail, filling his mouth with the word as if he
+loved it.
+
+"Yet"--it was King who spoke now, pointing an accusing finger at
+him--"a burra sahib sends a tar to me--this is it!--to say she is
+in Delhi still!  Who told thee to answer those questions with those
+words?"
+ 
+"She!" the big man answered.
+
+"Yasmini?"
+
+"Aye!  May Allah cover her with blessings!"
+
+"Ah!" said King.  "You have my leave to depart out of earshot."
+
+Then he turned on Rewa Gunga.
+
+"Whatever the truth of all this," he said quietly, "I suppose it
+means she has done what there was to do in Delhi?"
+
+"Sahib,--trust her! Does a tigress hunt where no watercourses are,
+and where no game goes to drink?  She follows the sambur!"
+
+"You are positive she has started for the North?"
+
+"Sahib, when she speaks it is best to believe!  She told me she
+will go.  Therefore I am ready to lead King sahib up the Khyber to her!"
+
+"Are you certain you can find her?"
+
+"Aye, sahib,--in the dark!"
+ 
+"There's a train leaves for the North to-night," said King.
+
+The Rangar nodded.
+
+"You'll want a pass up the line.  How many servants?  Three--four--
+how many?"
+
+"One," said the Rangar, and King was instantly suspicious of the
+modesty of that allowance;  however he wrote out a pass for Rewa
+Gunga and one servant and gave it to him.
+
+"Be there on time and see about your own reservation," he said.
+"I'll attend to Ismail's pass myself."
+
+He folded the list of names that the Rangar had marked and wrote
+something on the back.  Then he begged an envelope, and Rewa Gunga
+had one brought to him.  He sealed the list in the envelope, addressed
+it and beckoned Ismail again.
+
+"Take this to Saunders sahib!" he ordered.  "Go first to the telegraph
+office, where you were before, and the babu there will tell you where
+Saunders sahib may be found.  Having found him, deliver the letter
+to him.  Then come and find me at the Star of India Hotel and help
+me to bathe and change my clothes."
+
+"To hear is to obey!" boomed Ismail, bowing;  but his last glance
+was for Rewa Gunga, and be did not turn to go until he had met the
+Rangar's eyes.
+
+When Ismail had gone striding down the room, with no glance to spare
+for the whispering women in the window, and with dignity like an
+aura exuding from
+him, King looked into the Rangar's eyes with that engaging frankness
+of his that disarms so many people.
+
+"Then you'll be on the train to-night?" he asked.
+
+"To hear is to obey!  With pleasure, sahib!"
+
+"Then good-by until this evening."
+
+King bowed very civilly and walked out, rather unsteadily because
+his head ached.  Probably nobody else, except the Rangar, could
+have guessed what an ordeal he had passed through or how near he
+had been to losing self-command.
+
+But as he felt his way down the stairs, that were dimly lighted now,
+he knew he had all his senses with him, for he "spotted" and admired
+the lurking places that had been designed for undoing of the unwary,
+or even the overwary.  Yasmini's Delhi nest was like a hundred traps
+in one.
+
+"Almost like a pool table," he reflected.  "Pocket 'em at both ends
+and the middle!"
+
+In the street he found a gharry after a while and drove to his hotel.
+And before Ismail came he took a stroll through a bazaar, where he
+made a few strange purchases.  In the hotel lobby he invested in
+a leather bag with a good lock, in which to put them.  Later on
+Ismail came and proved himself an efficient body-servant.
+
+That evening Ismail carried the leather bag and found his place
+on the train, and that was not so difficult, because the trains
+running North were nearly empty, although the platforms were all
+crowded.  As he stood at the carriage door with Ismail near him,
+a man named Saunders slipped through the crowd and sought him out.
+
+"Arrested 'em all!" he grinned.
+
+"Good."
+
+"Seen anything of her?  I recognized Yasmini's scent on your envelope.
+It's peculiar to her--one of her monopolies!"
+
+"No.  I'm told she went North yesterday."
+
+"Not by train, she didn't!  It's my business to know that!"
+
+King did not answer; nor did he look surprised.  He was watching
+Rewa Gunga, followed by a servant, hurrying to a reserved compartment
+at the front end of the train.  The Rangar waved to him and he
+waved back.
+
+"I'd know her in a million!" vowed Saunders.  "I can take oath she
+hasn't gone anywhere by train!  Unless she has walked, or taken a
+carriage, she's in Delhi!"
+
+The engine gave a preliminary shriek and the giant Ismail nudged
+King's elbow in impatient warning.  There was no more sign of Rewa
+Gunga, who had evidently settled down in his compartment for
+the night.
+
+"Get my bag out again!" King ordered, and Ismail stared.
+
+"Get out my bag, I said!"
+
+"To hear is to obey!" Ismail grumbled, reaching with his long arm
+through the window.
+
+The engine shrieked again, somebody whistled, and the train began
+to move.
+
+"You've missed it!" said Saunders, amused at Ismail's frantic
+disappointment.  The giant was tugging at his beard.  "How about
+your trunk?  Better wire ahead and have it spotted for you."
+
+        "No," said King;  "it's still in the baggage room a the
+other station.  I didn't intend to go by this train.  Came down
+here to see another fellow off, that's all!  Have a cigar and then
+let's go together and look those prisoners over!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+
+
+Men boast in the Hills, when they ought to pray;
+For the wind blows lusty, and the blood runs red,
+And Law lies belly upwards for a man to wreak his fancy on it.
+Down in the plains, in the dust of the plains
+Where law is master and a good man ought to boast,
+They all lie belly downwards praying for their Hills again!
+
+
+The rear lights of the train he had not taken swayed out of Delhi
+station and King grinned as he wiped the sweat from his face with
+a dripping handkerchief. Behind him towered the hook-nosed Ismail,
+resentful of the unexpected.  In front of him Saunders eyed the
+proffered black cheroots suspiciously, accepted one with an air
+of curiosity and passed the case back.  Around them the clatter
+of the station crowd began to die, and Parsimony in a shabby uniform
+went round to lower lights.
+
+"Are you sure--"
+
+King's merry eyes looked into Saunders' as if there were no world
+war really and they two were puppets in a comedy.
+
+"--are you absolutely certain Yasmini is in Delhi?"
+
+"No," said Saunders.  "What I swear to is that she has not left
+by train.  It's my business to know who leaves by train."
+
+"What can you suggest?" asked King, twisting at his scrubby little
+mustache.  But if be wished to convey the impression of a man at
+his wits'end, he failed signally.
+ 
+"I?  Nothing!  She's the most elusive individual in Asia!  One
+person in the world knows where she is, unless she has an accomplice.
+My information's negative.  I know she has not gone by--"
+
+King struck a match and held it out, so the sentence was unfinished;
+the first few puffs of the astonishing cigar wiped out all memory
+of the missing word.  And then King changed the subject.
+
+"Those men I asked you to arrest--?"
+
+"Nabbed"--puff--"every one of 'em!"--puff--puff--"all under"--puff--
+puff--"lock and key,--best smoke I ever tasted--where d'you get 'em?"
+
+"Had they been in communication with her?"
+
+Puff--puff--"You bet they had!  Where d'you get these things?"
+
+"Not her special men by any chance?"
+
+Puff--"Gad, what smoke!--couldn't say, of course, but"--puff--puff--
+"shouldn't think so."
+
+"Well--I'll go along with you if you like, and look them over."
+
+Both tone and manner gave Saunders credit for the suggestion, and
+Saunders seemed to like it.  There is nothing like following up,
+in football, war or courtship.
+
+"I see you're a judge of a cigar," said King, and Saunders purred,
+all men being fools to some extent, and the only trouble being to
+demonstrate the fact.
+
+They had started for the station entrance when a nasal voice began
+intoning, "Cap-teen King sahib--Cap-teen King sahib!" and a telegraph
+messenger passed them with his book under his arm.  King whistled
+him.  A moment later he was tearing open an official urgent telegram
+and writing a string of figures in pencil across the top.  Then he
+decoded swiftly,
+
+        "Advices are Yasmini was in Delhi as recently as six
+        this evening.  Fail to understand your inability to
+        get in touch.  Have you tried at her house?  Matters
+        in Khyber district much less satisfactory.  Word from
+        O-C Khyber Rifles to effect that lashkar is collecting.
+        Better sweep up in Delhi and proceed northward as quickly
+        as compatible with caution.   L. M. L."
+
+The three letters at the end were the general's coded signature.
+The wording of the telegram was such that as he read King saw a
+mental picture of the general's bald red skull and could almost
+hear him say the "fail to understand."  The three words 'much less
+satisfactory" were a bookful of information.  So, as he folded up
+the telegram, tore the penciled strip of figures from the top and
+burned it with a match, he was at pains to look pleased.
+
+"Good news?" asked Saunders, blowing smoke through his nose.
+
+"Excellent.  Where's my man?  Here--you--Ismail!"
+
+The giant came and towered above him.
+
+"You swore she went North!"
+
+"Ha, sahib!  To Peshawur she went!"
+
+"Did she start from this station?"
+
+"From where else, sahib?"
+
+But this was too much for Saunders, who stepped forward and thrust
+in an oar.  King on the other band stepped back a pace so as to
+watch both faces.
+
+"Then, when did she go?"
+
+"I saw her go!" said Ismail, affronted.
+
+"When?  When, confound you!  When?"
+
+"Yesterday."
+
+"I expect he means to-morrow," said King.  With the advantage of
+looker-on and a very deep experience of Northerners, he had noted
+that Ismail was lying and that Saunders was growing doubtful,
+although both men concealed the truth with what was very close to
+being art.
+
+"I have a telegram here," he said, "that says she is in Delhi!"
+
+He patted his coat, where the inner pocket bulged.
+
+"Nay, then the tar lies, for I saw her go with these two eyes of mine!"
+
+"It is not wise to lie to me, my friend," King assured him, so
+pleasantly that none could doubt he was telling truth.
+
+"If I lie may I eat dirt!" Ismail answered him.
+
+Inches lent the Afridi dignity, but dignity has often been used
+as a stalking horse for untruth.  King nodded, and it was not
+possible to judge by his expression whether he believed or not.
+
+"Let's make a move," be said, turning to Saunders.  "She seems at
+any rate to wish it believed she has gone North.  I can't stay here
+indefinitely.  If she's here she's on the watch here, and there's
+no need of me.  If she has gone North, then that is where the kites
+are wheeling!  I'll take the early morning train.  Where are
+the prisoners?"
+
+"In the old Mir Khan Palace.  We were short of jail room and had
+to improvise.  The horse-stalls there have come in handy more than
+once before.  Shall we take this gharry?"
+
+With Ismail up beside the driver nursing King's bag and looking
+like a great grim vulture about to eat the horse, they drove back
+through swarming streets in the direction of the river.  King seemed
+to have lost all interest in crowds.  He scarcely even troubled
+to watch when they were held up at a cross-roads by a marching
+regiment that tramped as if it were herald of the Last Trump, with
+bayonets glistening in the street lights.  He sat staring ahead
+in silence, although Saunders made more than one effort to engage
+him in conversation.
+
+"No!" he said at last suddenly--so that Saunders jumped.
+
+"No what?"
+
+"No need to stay here.  I've got what I came for!"
+
+"What was that?" asked Saunders, but King was silent again.  Conscious
+of the unaccustomed weight on his left wrist, he moved his arm so
+that the sleeve drew and he could see the edge of the great gold
+bracelet Rewa Gunga had given him in Yasmini's name.
+
+"Know anything of Rewa Gunga?" he asked suddenly again.
+
+"The Rangar?"
+
+"Yes, the Rangar.  Yasmini's man."
+
+"Not much.  I've seen him.  I've spoken with him, and I've had to
+stand impudence from him--twice.  I've been tipped off more than
+once to let him alone because he's her man.  He does ticklish errands
+for her, or so they say.  He's what you might call 'known to the
+police' all right."
+
+They began to approach an age-old palace near the river, and Saunders
+whispered a pass-word when an armed guard halted them.  They were
+halted again at a gloomy gateway where an officer came out to look
+them over;  by his leave they left the gharry and followed him under
+the arch until their heels rang on stone paving in a big ill-lighted
+courtyard surrounded by high walls.
+
+There, after a little talk, they left Ismail squatting beside King's
+bag, and Saunders led the way through a modern iron door, into what
+had once been a royal prince's stables.
+
+In gloom that was only thrown into contrast by a wide-spaced row
+of electric lights, a long line of barred and locked converted
+horse-stalls ran down one side of a lean-to building.  The upper
+half of each locked door was a grating of steel rods, so that there
+was some ventilation for the prisoners;  but very little light
+filtered between the bars, and all that King could see of the men
+within was the whites of their eyes.  And they did not look friendly.
+
+He had to pass between them and the light, and they could see more
+of him than he could of them.  At the first cell he raised his left
+hand and made the gold bracelet on his wrist clink against the
+steel bars.
+
+A moment later be cursed himself, and felt the bracelet with his
+fingernail.  He had made a deep nick in the soft gold.  A second
+later yet he smiled.
+
+"May God be with thee!" boomed a prisoner's voice in Pashtu.
+
+"Didn't know that fellow was handcuffed," said Saunders.  "Did you
+hear the ring?  They should have been taken off.  Leaving his irons
+on has made him polite, though."
+
+He passed oil, and King followed him, saying nothing.  But at the
+next cell he repeated what he had done at the first, taking better
+care of the gold but letting his wrist stay longer in the light.
+ 
+"May God be with thee!" said a voice within.
+
+"Gettin' a shade less arrogant, what?" said Saunders.
+
+"May God be with thee!" said a man in the third stall as King passed.
+
+"They seem to be anxious for your morals!" laughed Saunders, keeping
+a pace or two ahead to do the honors of the place.
+
+"May God be with thee!" said a fourth man, and King desisted for
+the present, because Saunders looked as if he were growing inquisitive.
+
+"Where did you arrest them?" he asked when Saunders came to a stand
+under a light.
+
+"All in one place. At Ali's."
+
+"Who and what is Ali?"
+
+"Pimp--crimp--procurer--Prussian spy and any other evil thing that
+takes his fancy!  Runs a combination gambling hell and boarding house.
+Lets 'em run into debt and blackmails 'em.  Ali's in the kaiser's
+pay--that's known!  'Musing thing about it is he keeps a photo of
+Wilhelm in his pocket and tries to make himself believe the kaiser
+knows him by name.  Suffers from swelled head, which is part of
+their plan, of course.  We'll get him when we want him, but at
+present he's useful 'as is' for a decoy.  Ali was very much upset
+at the arrest--asked in the name of Heaven--seems to be familiar
+with God, too, and all the angels! -how he shall collect all the
+money these men owe him!"
+
+"You wouldn't call these men prosperous, then?"
+
+"Not exactly!  Ali is the only spy out of the North who prospers
+much at present, and even he gets most of his money out of his
+private business.  Why, man, the real Germans we have pounced on
+are all as poor as church mice.  That's another part of the plan,
+of course, which is sweet in all its workings.  They're paid less
+than driven by threats of exposure to us--comes cheaper, and serves
+to ginger up the spies!  The Germans pay Ali a little, and he traps
+the Hillmen when they come South--lets 'em gamble--gets 'em into
+debt--plays on their fear of jail and their ignorance of the Indian
+Penal Code, which altereth every afternoon--and spends a lot of
+time telling 'em stories to take back with 'em to the Hills when
+they can get away.  They can get away when they've paid him what
+they owe.  He makes that clear, and of course that's the fly in
+the amber.  Yasmini sends and pays their board and gambling debts,
+and she's our man, so to speak.  When they get back to the 'Hills'--"
+
+"Thanks," said King, "I know what happens in the 'Hills."  Tell
+me about the Delhi end of it."
+
+"Well, when the wander-fever grabs 'em again they come down once
+more from their 'Hills' to drink and gamble,--and first they go
+to Yasmini's.  But she won't let 'em drink at her place.  Have to
+give her credit for that, y'know;  her place has never been a stews.
+Sooner or later they grow tired of virtue, 'specially with so much
+intrigue goin' on under their noses, and back they all drift to
+Ali's and tell him tales to tell the Germans--and the round begins
+again.  Yasmini coaxes all their stories out of 'em and primes 'em
+with a few extra good ones into the bargain.  Everybody's fooled--
+'specially the Germans--and exceptin', of course, Yasmini and the
+Raj.  Nobody ever fooled that woman, nor ever will if my belief
+goes for anything!"
+
+"Sounds simple!" said King.
+ 
+"Simple and sordid!" agreed Saunders.
+
+King looked up and down the line of locked doors and then straight
+into Saunders' eyes in a friendly, yet rather disconcerting way.
+One could not judge whether he were laughing or just thinking.
+
+"D'you suppose it's as simple as all that?"
+
+"How d'you mean?"
+
+"D'you suppose the Germans aren't in directer touch with the tribes?"
+
+"Why should they be?  The simpler the better, I expect, from their
+point of view;  and the cheaper the better, too!"
+
+"Um-m-m!" King rubbed his chin.  "On what charge did you get these men?"
+
+"Defense of the Realm--suspicious characters--charge to be entered later."
+
+"Good!  That's simple at all events!  Know anything of my man Ismail?"
+
+"Sure!  He's one of Yasmini's pets.  She bailed him out of Ali's
+three years ago and he worships her.  It was he who broke the leg
+and ribs of a pup-rajah a month or two ago for putting on too much
+dog in her reception room!  He's Ursus out of Quo Vadis!  He's dog,
+desperado, stalking horse and Keeper of the Queen's secrets!"
+
+"Then why d'you suppose she passed him along to me?" asked King.
+ 
+"Dunno!  This is your little mystery, not mine!"
+
+"Glad you appreciate that!  Do me a favor, will you?"
+
+"Anything in reason."
+
+"Get the keys to all these cells--send 'em in here to me by Ismail--
+and leave me in here alone!"
+ 
+Saunders whistled and wiped sweat from his glistening face, for
+in spite of windows open to the courtyard it was hotter than a
+furnace room.
+
+"Mayn't I have you thrown into a den of tigers?" he asked.  "Or a
+nest of cobras?  Or get the fiery furnace ready?  You'll find 'em
+sore--and dangerous!  That man at the end with handcuffs on has
+probably been violent!  That 'God be with thee' stuff is habit--
+they say it with unction before they knife a man!"
+
+"I'll be careful, then," King chuckled;  and it is a fact that few
+men can argue with him when he laughs quietly in that way.  "Send
+me in the keys, like a good chap."
+
+So Saunders went, glad enough to get into the outer air.  He slammed
+the great iron door behind him as if he were glad, too, to disassociate
+himself from King and all foolishness.  Like many another first-class
+man, King sheds friends as a cat sheds fur going under a gate.  They
+grow again and quit again and don't seem to make much difference.
+
+The instant the door slammed King continued down the line with his
+left wrist held high so that the occupant of each cell in turn could
+see the bracelet.
+
+"May God be with thee!" came the instant greeting from each cell
+until down toward the farther end. The occupants of the last six
+cells were silent.
+
+Numbers had been chalked roughly on the doors.  With wetted fingers
+he rubbed out the chalk marks on the last six doors, and he had
+scarcely finished doing that when Ismail strode in, slamming the
+great iron door behind him, jangling a bunch of keys and looking
+more than ever like somebody out of the Old Testament.
+ 
+"Open every door except those whose numbers I have rubbed out!"
+King ordered him.
+
+Ismail proceeded to obey as if that were the least improbable order
+in all the world.  It took him two minutes to select the pass-key
+and determine how it worked, then the doors flew open one after
+another in quick succession.
+
+"Come out!" he growled.  "Come out!--Come out!" although King had
+not ordered that.
+
+King went and stood under the center light with his left arm bared.
+The prisoners, emerging like dead men out of tombs, blinked at the
+bright light--saw him--then the bracelet--and saluted.
+
+"May God be with thee!" growled each of them.
+
+They stood still then, awaiting fresh developments.  It did not
+seem to occur to any one of them as strange that a British officer
+in khaki uniform should be sporting Yasmini's talisman;  the thing
+was apparently sufficient explanation in itself.
+
+"Ye all know this?" he asked, holding up his wrist.  Whose is this?"
+
+"Hers!"
+
+The answer was monosyllabic and instant from all thirty throats.
+"May Allah guard her, sleeping and awake!" added one or two of them.
+
+King lit a cheroot and made mental note of the wisdom of referring
+to her by pronoun, not by name.
+
+"And I?  Who am!?" he asked, since it saves worlds of trouble to
+have the other side state the case.  The Secret Service was not
+designed for giving information, but discovering it.
+
+"Her messenger!  Who else?  Thou art he who shall take us to the
+'Hills'!  She promised!" 
+ 
+"How did she know ye were in this jail?" he asked them, and one
+of the Hillmen laughed like a jackal, showing yellow eye-teeth.
+The others cackled in chorus after him.
+
+"Answer that riddle thyself--or else ask her!  Who are we?  Bats,
+that can see in the night?  Spirits, who can hear through walls?
+Nay, we be plain men of the mountains!"
+
+"But where were ye when she promised?"
+
+"At Ali's.  All of us at Ali's--held for debt.  We sent and begged
+of her.  She sent word back by a woman that one of the sirkar's
+men shall free us and send us home.  So we waited, eating shame
+and little else, at Ali's.  At last came a sahib in a great rage,
+who ordered irons put on our wrists and us marched hither.  Only
+when each was pushed into a separate cell were the irons taken off
+again.  Yet we were patient, for we knew this is part of her cunning,
+to get us away from Ali without paying him.  'May Ali die of want,'
+said we, with one voice all together in these cells!  And now we
+be ready!  They fed us before we had been in here an hour.  Our
+bellies be full, but we be hungry for the 'Hills'!"
+
+King thought of the gold-hilted knife, that still rested under his
+shirt.  He was tempted to show it to them and find out surely whose
+it was and what it meant.  But wisdom and curiosity seldom mingle.
+He thought of Ismail--"Ursus, of Quo Vadis--dog, desperado, stalking-
+horse and Keeper of the Queen's secrets."  It was not time yet to
+run risks with Ismail.  The knife stayed where it was.
+
+"I shall start for the Hills at dawn," he said slowly, and he watched
+their eyes gleam at the news.  No caged tiger is as wretched as a
+prisoned Hillman.  No freed bird wings more wildly for the open.
+No moth comes more foolishly back to the flame again.  It was easy
+to take pity on them--probably not one of whom knew pity's meaning.
+
+"Is there any among you who would care to come--?"
+
+"Ah-h-h-h!"
+
+"--at the price of strict obedience?"
+
+"Eh-h-h-h-h!"
+
+It seemed there was no word in Pashtu that could express their
+willingness.
+
+"We be very, very weary for our Hills!" explained the nearest man.
+
+"Aye!" King answered.  "And ye all owe Ali!"
+
+"Uh-h-h-h-h!"
+
+But he knew better than to browbeat them on that account just then,
+for the men of the North are easier led than driven--up to a certain
+point.  Yet it is no bad plan to remind them of the fundamentals
+to begin with.
+
+"Will ye obey me, and him?" he asked, laying his hand on Ismail's
+shoulder, as much to let them see the bracelet again as for any
+other reason.
+
+"Aye!  If we fail, Allah do more to us!"
+
+King laughed.  "Ye shall leave this place as my prisoners. Here
+ye have no friends.  Here ye must obey.  But what when ye come to
+your 'Hills' at last?  Can one man hold thirty men prisoners then?
+In the 'Hills' will ye still obey me?"
+
+They answered him in chorus.  Every man of the thirty, and Ismail
+into the bargain, threw his right hand in the air.
+
+"Allah witness that we will obey!"
+
+"Ah-h-h!" said King.  "I have heard Hillmen swear by Allah many a
+time! Many a time!"
+
+The answer to that was unexpected.  Ismail knelt--seized his hand--
+and pressed the gold bracelet to his lips!
+
+In turn, every one of them filed by, knelt reverently and kissed
+the bracelet!
+
+"Saw ye ever a Hillman do that before?" asked Ismail.  "They will
+obey thee!  Have no fear!"
+
+"Kutch dar nahin hai!" King answered.  "There is no such thing as
+fear!" and Ismail grinned at him, not knowing that King was feeling
+as Aladdin must have done.
+
+"I have heard you swear," said King; "be ye true men!"
+
+"Ah-h-h!"
+
+"Have they belongings that ought to be collected first?" he asked,
+and Ismail laughed.
+
+"No more than the dead have!  A shroud apiece!  Ali gave them
+bitterness to eat and picked their teeth afterward for gleanings!
+They stand in what they own!"
+
+"Then, come!" ordered King, turning his back confidently on thirty
+savages whom Saunders, for instance, would have preferred to drive
+in front of him, after first seeing them handcuffed.  But when he
+is not pressed for time neither pistols, nor yet handcuffs, are
+included in King's method.
+
+"Each lock has a key, but some keys fit all locks," says the Eastern
+proverb.  King has been chosen for many ticklish errands in his time,
+and Saunders is still in Delhi.
+ 
+Through the great iron door into dim outer darkness King led them
+and presently made them squat in a close-huddled semicircle on the
+paving stones, like night-birds waiting for a meal.
+
+"I want blankets for them--two good ones apiece--and food for a
+week's journey!" he told the astonished Saunders;  and he spoke
+so decidedly that the other man's questions and argument died
+stillborn.  "While you attend to that for me, I'll be seeing his
+dibs and making explanations.  You look full of news.  What do
+you know?"
+
+"I've telephoned all the other stations, and my men swear Yasmini
+has not left Delhi by train!"
+
+King smiled at him.
+
+"If I leave by train d'you suppose she'll hear of it?"
+
+"You bet!  Bet your boots!  Man alive--if she's interested in you
+by so much," --he measured off a fraction of his little finger end--
+"she knows your next two moves ahead, to say nothing of your past
+half-dozen!  I crossed her bows once and thought I had her at a
+disadvantage.  She laughed at me.  On my honor, my spine tingles
+yet at the mere thought of it!  You've never met her?  Never heard
+her laugh?  Never seen her eyes?  You've a treat in store for you--
+and a mauvais quat' d'heure!  What'll you bet me she doesn't laugh
+you out of countenance the very first time you meet?  Come now--
+what'll you bet?"
+
+"Not in the habit," King answered, glancing at his watch.  "Will
+you see about their rations, please, and the blankets?  Thanks!"
+
+They went then in opposite directions and the prisoners were left
+squatting under the eyes and bayonets of a very suspicious prison
+guard, who made no secret of being ready for all conceivable emergencies.
+One enthusiast drew the cartridge out of his breech-chamber and
+licked it at intervals of a minute or two, to the very great interest
+of the Hillmen, who memorized every detail that by any stretch of
+imagination might be expected to improve their own shooting when
+they should get home again.
+
+King found his way on foot through a maze of streets to a palace
+where he was admitted through one door after another by sentries
+who saluted when he had whispered to them.  He ended by sitting
+on the end of the bed of a gray-headed man who owns three titles
+and whose word is law between the borders of a province.  To him
+he talked as one schoolboy to a bigger one, because the gray-haired
+man had understanding, and hence sympathy.
+
+"I don't envy you!" said he under the sheet.  "There was an American
+here not long ago--most amusing man I ever talked to.  He had the
+right expression.  'I do not desiderate that pie!' was his way of
+putting it.  Good, don't you think?"
+
+All the while he talked the older man was writing on a pad that he
+held propped by his knees beneath the bedclothes, holding the paper
+tight to keep it from fluttering in the breeze of a big electric fan.
+
+"There's the release for your prisoners.  Take it--and take them!
+Whatever possessed you to want such a gift?"
+
+"Orders, sir."
+
+"Whose?"
+
+"His.  He sent for me to Peshawur and gave me strict orders to
+work with, not against her.  This was obvious."
+ 
+"How obvious?  It seems bewildering!"
+
+"Well, sir,--first place, she doesn't want to seem to be connected
+with me.  Otherwise she'd have been more in evidence.  Second place,
+she has left Delhi--his telegram and Saunders' men on oath
+notwithstanding--and she did not mean to leave those men.  I imagine
+her best way to manage Hillmen is to keep promises, and they say
+she promised them.  Third place, if those thirty men had been
+anything but her particular pet gang they'd either have been over
+the border or else in jail before now,--just like all the others.
+For some reason that I don't pretend to understand, she promised
+'em more than she has been able to perform.  So I provide performance.
+She gets the credit for it.  I get a pretty good personal following
+at least as far as up the Khyber!  Q.E.D.,sir!"
+
+The man in bed nodded. "Not bad," he said.
+
+"Didn't she make some effort to get those men away from Ali's?"
+King asked him.  "I mean, didn't she try to get them dry-nursed
+by the sirkar in some way?"
+
+"Yes.  She did.  But it was difficult.  In the first place, there
+didn't seem to be any particular hurry.  They were eating Ali's
+substance.  The scoundrel had to feed them as long as he kept them
+there, and we wanted that.  We forbade her to pay their debts to Ali,
+because he has too urgent need of money just now.  He is being
+pressed on account of debts of his own, and the pressure is making
+him take risks.  He has been begging for money from the German agents.
+We know who they are, and we expect to make a big haul within a
+few hours now."
+
+"Hope I didn't spoil things by butting in, sir."
+
+"No.  This is different.  She wanted them arrested and locked up
+at a moment when the jails were all crowded.  And then she wanted
+us to put 'em into trucks and railroad 'em up North out of harm's
+way as she put it, and we happened to be too busy.  The railway
+staff was overworked.  Now things are getting straightened out.
+I felt it keenly not being able to oblige her, but she asked too
+much at the wrong moment!  I would have done it if I could out of
+gratitude;  it was she who tipped off for us most of the really
+dangerous men, and it was not her fault a few of them escaped.
+But we've all been working both tides under, King.  Take me;  this
+is my first night in bed in three, and here I am awake!  No--nothing
+personal--glad to see you, but please understand.  And I'm a leisured
+dilettante compared to most of the others.  She must have known
+our fix.  She shouldn't have asked."
+
+King smiled.  "Perfectly good opportunity for me, sir!" he said
+cheerfully.
+
+"So you seem to think.  But look out for that woman, King--she's
+dangerous.  She's got the brains of Asia coupled with Western energy!
+I think she's on our side, and I know he believes it; but watch her!"
+
+"Ham dekta hai!" King grinned.  But the older man continued to look
+as if he pitied him.
+
+"If you get through alive, come and tell me about it afterward.
+Now, mind you do!  I'm awfully interested, but as for envying you--"
+
+"Envy!" King almost squealed.  He made the bed-springs rattle as
+he jumped.  "I wouldn't swap jobs with General French, sir!"
+
+"Nor with me, I suppose!"
+ 
+"Nor with you, sir.
+
+"Good-by, then.  Good-by, King, my boy.  Good-by, Athelstan.  Your
+brother's up the Khyber, isn't he?  Give him my regards.  Good-by!"
+
+Long before dawn the thirty prisoners and Ismail squatted in a
+little herd on the up-platform of a railway station, shepherded
+by King, who smoked a cheroot some twenty paces away, sitting on
+an unmarked chest of medicines.  He seemed absorbed in a book on
+surgery that he had borrowed from a chance-met acquaintance in the
+go-down where he drew the medical supplies.  Ismail sat on the one
+trunk that had been fetched from the other station and nursed the
+new hand-bag on his knees, picking everlastingly at the lock and
+wondering audibly what the bag contained to an accompaniment of
+low-growled sympathy.
+
+"I am his servant--for she said so--and he said so.  As the custom
+is he gave me the key of the great bag--on which I sit--as he said
+himself, for safe-keeping.  Then why--why in Allah's name--am I
+not to have the key of this bag too?  Of this little bag that holds
+so little and is so light?"
+
+"It might be money in it?" hazarded one of the herd.
+
+"Nay, for that it is too light."
+
+"Paper money!" suggested another man.  "Hundies, with printing on
+the face that sahibs accept instead of gold."
+
+"Nay, I know where his money is," said Ismail.  "He has but little
+with him."
+
+"A razor would slit the leather easily," suggested another man.
+"Then with a hand inserted carefully through the slit, so as not
+to widen it more than needful, a man could soon discover the contents.
+And later, the bag might be dropped or pushed violently against
+some sharp thing, to explain the cut."
+
+Ismail shook his head.
+
+"Why?  What could he do to thee?"
+
+"It is because I know not what he would do to me that I will do
+nothing!" answered Ismail.  "He is not at all like other sahibs I
+have had dealings with.  This man does unexpected things.  This
+man is not mad, he has a devil.  I have it in my heart to love
+this man.  But such talk is foolishness. We are all her men!"
+
+"Aye!  We are her men!" came the chorus, so that King looked up
+and watched them over the open book.
+
+At dawn, when the train pulled out, the thirty prisoners sat safely
+locked in third-class compartments.  King lay lazily on the cushions
+of a first-class carriage in the rear, utterly absorbed in the
+principles of antiseptic dressing, as if that had anything to do
+with Prussians and the Khyber Pass;  and Ismail attended to the
+careful packing of soda water bottles in the ice-box on the floor.
+
+"Shall I open the little bag, sahib?" he asked.
+
+King shook his head.
+
+Ismail shook the bag.
+
+"The sound is as of things of much importance all disordered," he
+said sagely.  "It might be well to rearrange."
+
+"Put it over there!" King ordered.  "Set it down!"
+
+Ismail obeyed and King laid his book down to light another of his
+black cheroots.  The theme of antiseptics ceased to exercise its
+charm over him.  He peeled off his tunic, changed his shirt and
+lay back in sweet contentment.  Headed for the "Hills," who would
+not be contented, who had been born in their very shadow?--in their
+shadow, of a line of Britons who have all been buried there!
+
+"The day after to-morrow I'll see snow!" he promised himself.  And
+Ismail, grinning with yellow teeth through a gap in his wayward
+beard, understood and sympathized.
+
+Forward in the third-class carriages the prisoners hugged themselves
+and crooned as they met old landmarks and recognized the changing
+scenery.  There was a new cleaner tang in the hot wind that spoke
+of the "Hills" and home!
+
+Delhi had drawn them as Monte Carlo attracts the gamblers of all
+Europe.  But Delhi had spewed them out again, and oh! how exquisite
+the promise of the "Hills" was, and the thunder of the train that
+hurried--the bumping wheels that sang Himahlayas--Himahlyas!--the
+air that blew in on them unscented--the reawakened memory--the
+heart's desire for the cold and the snow and the cruelty--the dark
+nights and the shrieking storms and the savagery of the Land of
+the Knife ahead!
+
+The journey to Peshawur, that ought to have been wearisome because
+they were everlastingly shunted into sidings to make way for roaring
+south-bound troop trains and kept waiting at every wayside station
+because the trains ahead of them were blocked three deep, was no
+less than a jubilee progress!
+
+Not a packed-in regiment went by that was not howled at by King's
+prisoners as if they were blood-brothers of every man in it.  Many
+an officer whom King knew waved to him from a passing train.
+
+"Meet you in Berlin!" was a favorite greeting.  And after that
+they would shout to him for news and be gone before King could answer.
+
+Many a man, at stations where the sidings were all full and nothing
+less than miracles seemed able to release the wedged-in trains,
+came and paced up and down a platform side by side with King.  From
+them he received opinions, but no sympathy to speak of.
+
+"Got to stay in India?  Hard lines!"  Then the conversation would
+be bluntly changed, for in the height of one's enthusiasm it is
+not decent to hurt another fellow's feelings.  Simple, simple as
+a little child is the clean-clipped British officer.  "Look at that
+babu, now.  Don't you think he's a marvel?  Don't you think the
+Indian babu's a marvel?  Sixty a month is more than the beggar gets,
+and there he goes, doing two jobs and straightening out tangled
+trains into the bargain!  Isn't he a wonder, King?"
+
+"India's a wonderful country," King would answer, that being one
+of his stock remarks.  And to his credit be it written that he
+never laughed at one of them.  He let them think they were more
+fortunate than he, with manlier, bloodier work to do.
+
+Peshawur, when they reached it at last, looked dusty and bleak in
+the comfortless light of Northern dawn.  But the prisoners crowed
+and crooned it a greeting, and there was not much grumbling when
+King refused to unlock their compartment doors.  Having waited
+thus long, they could endure a few more hours in patience, now
+that they could see and smell their "Hills" at last.
+
+And there was the general again, not in a dog-cart this time, but
+furiously driven in a motor-car, roaring and clattering into the
+station less than two minutes after the train arrived.  He was out
+of the car, for all his age and weight, before it had come to a stand.
+He took one steady look at King and then at the prisoners before
+he returned King's salute.
+
+"Good!" he said.  And then, as if that were not enough:  "Excellent!
+Don't let 'em out, though, to chew the rag with people on the platform.
+Keep 'em in!"
+
+"They're locked in, sir."
+
+"Excellent!  Come and walk up and down with me."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+
+
+Death roosts in the Khyber while he preens his wings!
+--Native Proverb
+
+
+Seen her?" asked the general, with his hands behind him.
+
+"No," said King, looking sharply sidewise at him and walking stride
+for stride.  His hands were behind him, too, and one of them covered
+the gold bracelet on his other wrist.
+
+The general looked equally sharply sidewise.
+
+"Nor've I," he said.  "She called me up over the phone yesterday
+to ask for facilities for her man Rewa Gunga, and he was in here
+later.  He's waiting for you at the foot of the Pass--camped near
+the fort at Jamrud with your bandobast all ready.  She's on ahead--
+wouldn't wait."
+
+King listened in silence, and his prisoners, watching him through
+the barred compartment windows, formed new and golden opinions of
+him, for it is common knowledge in the "Hills" that when a burra
+sahib speaks to a chota sahib, the chota sahib ought to say, "Yes,
+sir, oh, yes!" at very short intervals.  Therefore King could not be
+a chota sahib after all.  So much the better.  The "Hills" ever loved
+to deal with men in authority, just as they ever despised underlings.
+
+"What made you go back for the prisoners?" the general asked.  "Who
+gave you that cue?"
+
+"It's a safe rule never to do what the other man expects, sir, and
+Rewa Gunga expected me to travel by his train."
+
+"Was that your only reason?"
+
+"No, sir.  I had general reasons.  None of 'em specific.  Where
+natives have a finger in the pie there's always something left
+undone at the last minute."
+
+"But what made you investigate those prisoners?"
+
+"Couldn't imagine why thirty men should be singled out for special
+treatment.  Rewa Gunga told me they were still at large in Delhi.
+Couldn't guess why.  Had 'em arrested so's to be able to question 'em.
+That's all, sir."
+
+"Not nearly all!" said the general.  "You realize by now, I suppose,
+that they're her special men--special personal following?"
+
+"Guessed something of that sort."
+
+"Well--she's clever.  It occurred to her that the safest way to
+get 'em up North was to have 'em arrested and deported.  That would
+avoid interference and delay and would give her a chance to act
+deliverer at this end, and so make 'em grateful to her--you see?
+Rewa Gunga told me all this, you understand.  He seems to think
+she's semi-divine.  He was full of her cleverness in having thought
+of letting 'em all get into debt at a house of ill repute, so as
+to have 'em at hand when she wanted 'em."
+
+"She must have learned that trick from our merchant marine," said King.
+ 
+"Maybe. She's clever.  She asked me over the phone whether her
+thirty men had started North.  I sent a telegram in cypher to
+find out.  The answer was that you had found 'em and rounded 'em
+up and were bringing 'em with you.  When she called me up on the
+phone the second time I told her so, and I heard her chuckle with
+delight.  So I emphasized the point of your having discovered 'em
+and saved 'em every wit whole and all that kind of thing.  I asked
+her to come and see me, but she wouldn't,--said she was 'disguised
+and particularly did not want to be recognized, which was reasonable
+enough.  She sent Rewa Gunga instead.  Now, this seems important:
+
+"Before I sent you down to Delhi--before I sent for you at all--I
+told her what I meant to do, and I never in my life knew a woman
+raise such terrific objections to working with a man.  As it happened
+her objections only confirmed my determination to send for you,
+and before she went down to Delhi to clean up I told her flatly
+she would either have to work with you or else stay in India for
+the duration of the war."
+
+The general did not notice that King was licking his lips.  Nor,
+if he had noticed King's hand that now was in front of him pressing
+on something under his shirt, could he have guessed that the something
+was a gold-hilted knife with a bronze blade.  King grunted in token
+of attention, and the general continued.
+
+"She gave in finally, but I felt nervous about it.  Now, without
+your getting sight of her--you say you haven't seen her?--her whole
+attitude has changed!  What have you done?  Bringing up her thirty
+men seems a little enough thing.  Yet, she swears by you!  Used
+to swear at you, and now says you're the only officer in the British
+army with enough brains to fill a helmet!  Says she wouldn't go
+up the Khyber without you!  Says you're indispensable!  Sent Rewa
+Gunga round to me with orders to make sure I don't change my mind
+about you!  What have you done to her--bewitched her?"
+
+"Done nothing," said King.
+
+"Well, keep on doing nothing in the same style and the world shall
+render you its best jobs, one after the other, in sequence!  You've
+made a good beginning!"
+
+"Know anything of Rewa Gunga, sir?"
+
+"Nothing, except that he's her man.  She trusts him, so we've got to,
+and you've got to take him up the Khyber with you.  What she orders,
+he'll do, or you may take it from me she would never have left him
+behind.  As long as she is on our side you will be pretty safe in
+trusting Rewa Gunga.  And she has got to be on our side.  Got to be!
+She's the only key we've got to Khinjan, and hell is brewing there
+this minute!  She dare unlock the gates and ride the devil down
+the Khyber if she thought it worth her while!  You're to go up the
+Khyber after her to convince her that there are better mounts than
+the devil and better fun than playing with hell-fire!  The Rangar
+told me he had given you her passport--that right?"
+
+As they turned at the end of the platform King bared his wrist and
+showed the gold bracelet.
+
+"Good!" said the general, but King thought his face clouded.  "That
+thing is worth more than a hundred men.  Jack Allison wore that
+same bracelet, unless I'm much mistaken, on his way down in disguise
+from Bukhara.  So did another man we both knew; but he died.  Be
+sure not to forget to give it back to her when the show's over, King."
+
+King nodded and grunted.  "What's the news from Khinjan, sir?"
+
+"Nothing specific, except that the place is filling up. You remember
+what I told you about the 'Heart of the Hills' being in Khinjan?
+Well, they say now that the 'Heart of the Hills' has been awake
+for a long time, and that when the heart stirs the body does not
+lie quiet long.  No use trying to guess what they mean;  go and
+find out.  And remember--the whole armed force at my disposal in this
+Province isn't more than enough to tempt the tribes to conclusions!
+It's a case for diplomacy.  It's a case where diplomacy must not fail."
+
+King said nothing, but the chin-strap mark on his cheek and chin
+grew slightly whiter, as it always does under the stress of emotion.
+He can not control it, and he has dyed it more than once on the
+eve of happenings, there being no more wisdom in wearing feelings
+on one's face than on a sleeve.
+
+"Here comes your engine," said the general.  "Well--there are two
+battalions of Khyber Rifles up the Pass and they're about at full
+strength.  They've got word already that you are gazetted to them.
+They'll expect you.  By the way, you've a brother in the K.R.,
+haven't you?"
+
+"At Ali Masjid, sir."
+
+"Give him my regards when you see him, will you?"
+
+"Thank you, sir."
+
+"There's your engine whistling.  You'd better hurry, Good-by, my boy.
+Get word to me whenever possible.  Good luck to you!  Regards to
+your brother!  Good-by!"
+
+King saluted and stood watching while the general hurried to the
+waiting motor-car.  When the car whirled away in a din of dust he
+returned leisurely to the train that had been shortened to three
+coaches.  Then be gave the signal to start up the spur-track, that
+leads to Jamrud, where a fort cowers in the very throat of the
+dreadfulest gorge in Asia--the Khyber Pass.
+
+It was not a long journey, nor a very slow one, for there was nothing
+to block the way except occasional men with flags, who guarded
+culverts and little bridges.  The Germans would know better than
+to waste time or effort on blowing up that track, but there might
+be Northern gentlemen at large, out to do damage for the sport of it,
+and the sepoys all along the line were posted in twos, and awake.
+
+It was low-tide under the Himalayas.  The flood that was draining
+India of her armed men had left Jamrud high and dry with a little
+nondescript force stranded there, as it were, under a British major
+and some native officers.  There were no more pomp and circumstance;
+no more of the reassuring thunder of gathering regiments, nor for
+that matter any more of that unarmed native helplessness that so
+stiffens the backs of the official English.
+
+Frowning over Jamrud were the lean "Hills," peopled by the fiercest
+fighting men on earth, and the clouds that hung over the Khyber's
+course were an accent to the savagery.
+
+But King smiled merrily as he jumped out of the train, and Rewa
+Gunga, who was there to meet him, advanced with outstretched hand
+and a smile that would have melted snow on the distant peaks if
+he had only looked the other way.
+
+"Welcome, King sahib!" he laughed, with the air of a skilled fencer
+who admires another, better one.  "I shall know better another time
+and let you keep in front of me!  No more getting first into a train
+and settling down for the night!  It may not be easy to follow you,
+and I suspect it isn't, but at least it jolly well can't be such
+a job as leading you!  I trust you had a comfortable journey?"
+
+"Thanks," said King, shaking hands with him, and then turning away
+to unlock the carriage doors that held his prisoners in.  They were
+baying now like wolves to be free, and they surged out, like wolves
+from a cage, to clamor round the Rangar, pawing him and struggling
+to be first to ask him questions.
+
+"Nay, ye mountain people;  nay!" he laughed.  "I, too, am from the
+plains!  What do I know of your families or of your feuds?  Am I
+to be torn to pieces to make a meal?"
+
+At that Ismail interfered, with the aid of an ash pick-handle,
+chance-found beside the track.
+
+"Hill-bastards!" he howled at them, beating at them as if they were
+sheaves and his cudgel were a flail.  "Sons of nameless mothers!
+Forgotten of God!  Shameless!  Brood of the evil one!  Hands off!"
+
+King had to stop him, not that he feared trouble, for they did not
+seem to resent either abuse or cudgeling in the least--and that
+in itself was food for thought;  but broken shoulders are no use
+for carrying loads.
+
+Laughing as if the whole thing was the greatest joke imaginable,
+Rewa Gunga fell into stride beside King and led him away in the
+direction of some tents.
+
+"She is up the Pass ahead of us," he announced.  "She was in the
+deuce of a hurry, I can assure you.  She wanted to wait and meet you,
+but matters were too jolly well urgent, and we shall have our bally
+work cut out to catch her, you can bet!  But I have everything ready--
+tents and beds and stores--everything!"
+
+King looked over his shoulder to make sure that Ismail was bringing
+the little leather bag along.
+
+"So have I," he said quietly.
+
+"I have horses," said Rewa Gunga, "and mules and--"
+
+"How did she travel up the Khyber?" King asked him, and the Rangar
+spared him a curious sidewise glance.
+
+"On a horse.  You should have seen the horse!"
+
+"What escort had she?"
+
+"She?"
+
+Rewa Gunga chuckled and then suddenly grew serious.
+
+"The 'Hills' are her escort, King sahib.  She is mistress in the
+'Hills.'  There isn't a murdering ruffian who would not lie down
+and let her walk on him!  She rode away alone on a thoroughbred
+mare and she jolly well left me the mare's double on which to
+follow her.  Come and look."
+
+Not far from where the tents had been pitched in a cluster a string
+of horses winnied at a picket rope.  King saw the two good horses
+ready for himself, and ten mules beside them that would have done
+credit to any outfit.  But at the end of the line, pawing at the
+trampled grass, was a black mare that made his eyes open wide.
+Once in a hundred years or so a viceroy's cup, or a Derby is won
+by an animal that can stand and look and move as that mare did.
+
+"Just watch!" the Rangar boasted;  hooking up the bit and throwing
+off the blanket.  And as he mounted into the native-made rough-hide
+saddle a shout went up from the fort and native officers and half
+the soldiery came out to watch the poetry of motion.
+
+The mare was not the only one worth watching;  her rider shared
+the praise.  There was something unexpected, although not in the
+least ungainly, about the Rangar's seat in the saddle that was not
+the ordinary, graceful native balance and yet was full of grace.
+King ascribed the difference to the fact that the Rangar had seen
+no military service, and before the inadequacy of that explanation
+had asserted itself he had already forgotten to criticize in sheer
+admiration.
+
+There was none of the spurring and back-reining that some native
+bloods of India mistake for horse-manship.  The Rangar rode with
+sympathy and most consummate skill, and the result was that the
+mare behaved as if she were part of him, responding to his thoughts,
+putting a foot where he wished her to put it and showing her wildest
+turn of speed along a level stretch in instant response to his mood.
+
+"Never saw anything better," King admitted ungrudgingly, as the
+mare came back at a walk to her picket rope.
+
+"There is only one mare like this one," laughed the Rangar.  "She
+has her."
+
+"What'll you take for this one?" King asked him.  "Name your price!"
+
+"The mare is hers.  You must ask her. Who knows?  She is generous.
+There is nobody on earth more generous than she when she cares to be.
+See what you wear on your wrist!"
+
+"That is a loan," said King, uncovering the bracelet.  "I shall
+give it back to her when we meet."
+
+"See what she says when you meet!" laughed the Rangar, taking a
+cigarette from his jeweled case with an air and smiling as he
+lighted it.  "There is your tent, sahib."
+
+He motioned with the cigarette toward a tent pitched quite a hundred
+yards away from the others and from the Rangar's own;  with the
+Rangar's and the cluster of tents for the men it made an equilateral
+triangle, so that both he and the Rangar had privacy.
+
+With a nod of dismissal, King walked over to inspect the bandobast,
+and finding it much more extravagant than he would have dreamed
+of providing for himself, he lit one of his black cheroots, and
+with hands clasped behind him strolled over to the fort to interview
+Courtenay, the officer commanding.
+
+It so happened that Courtenay had gone up the Pass that morning
+with his shotgun after quail.  He came back into view, followed
+by his little ten-man escort just as King neared the fort, and
+King timed his approach so as to meet him.  The men of the escort
+were heavily burdened;  he could see that from a distance.
+
+"Hello!" he said by the fort gate, cheerily, after he had saluted
+and the salute had been returned.
+
+"Oh, hello, King!  Glad to see you.  Heard you were coming, of course.
+Anything I can do?"
+
+"Tell me anything you know," said King, offering him a cheroot
+which the other accepted.  As he bit off the end they stood facing
+each other, so that King could see the oncoming escort and what
+it carried.  Courtenay read his eyes.
+
+"Two of my men!" he said.  "Found 'em up the Pass.  Gazi work I think.
+They were cut all to pieces.  There's a big lashkar gathering
+somewhere in the 'Hills,' and it might have been done by their
+skirmishers, but I don't think so."
+
+"A lashkar besides the crowd at Khinjan?"
+ 
+"Yes."
+
+"Who's supposed to be leading it?"
+
+"Can't find out," said Courtenay.  Then he stepped aside to give
+orders to the escort.  They carried the dead bodies into the fort.
+
+"Know anything of Yasmini?" King asked, when the major stood in
+front of him again.
+
+"By reputation, of course, yes.  Famous person--sings like a bulbul--
+dances like the devil--lived in Delhi--mean her?"
+
+King nodded.  "When did she start up the Pass?" he asked.
+
+"How d'ye mean?" Courtenay demanded sharply.
+
+"To-day or yesterday?"
+
+"She didn't start!  I know who goes up and who comes down.  Would
+you care to glance over the list?"
+
+"Know anything of Rewa Gunga?" King asked him.
+
+"Not much.  Tried to buy his mare.  Seen the animal?  Gad!  I'd
+give a year's pay for that beast!  He wouldn't sell and I don't
+blame him."
+
+"He goes up the Khyber with me," said King.  "He's what the Turks
+would call my youldash."
+
+"And the Persians a hamrah, eh?         There was an American here
+lately--merry fellow--and I was learning his language.  Side partner's
+the word in the States.  I can imagine a worse side partner than
+that same man Rewa Gunga--much worse."
+
+"He told me just now," said King, "that Yasmini went up the Pass
+unescorted, mounted on a mare the very dead spit of the black one
+you say you wanted to buy."
+
+Courtenay whistled.
+
+"I'm sorry, King.  I'm sorry to say he lied."
+
+"Will you come and listen while I have it out with him?"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+King threw away his less-than-half-consumed cheroot and they started
+to walk together toward King's camp.  After a few minutes they
+arrived at a point from which they could see the prisoners lined
+up in a row facing Rewa Gunga.  A less experienced eye than King's or
+Courtenay's could have recognized their attitude of reverent obedience.
+
+"He'll make a good adjutant for you, that man," said Courtenay;  but
+King only grunted.
+
+At sight of them Ismail left the line and came hurrying toward them
+with long mountainman's strides.
+
+"Tell Rewa Gunga sahib that I wish to speak to him!" King called,
+and Ismail hurried back again.
+
+Within two minutes the Rangar stood facing them, looking more at
+ease than they.
+
+"I was cautioning those savages!" he explained.  "They're an escort,
+but they need a reminder of the fact, else they might jolly well
+imagine themselves mountain goats and scatter among the 'Hills'!"
+
+He drew out his wonderful cigarette case and offered it open to
+Courtenay, who hesitated, and then helped himself.  King refused.
+ 
+"Major Courtenay has just told me," said King, "that nobody resembling
+Yasmini has gone up the Pass recently.  Can you explain?"
+
+"You see, I've been watching the Pass," explained Courtenay.
+
+The Rangar shook his head, blew smoke through his nose and laughed.
+
+"And you did not see her go?" he said, as if he were very much amused.
+
+"No," said Courtenay. "She didn't go."
+
+"Can you explain?" asked King rather stiffly.
+
+"Do you mean, can I explain why the major failed to see her?  'Pon
+my soul, King sahib, d'you want me to insult the man?  Yasmini is
+too jolly clever for me, or for any other man I ever met;  and the
+major's a man, isn't he?  He may pack the Khyber so full of men
+that there's only standing room and still she'll go up without his
+leave if she chooses!  There is nobody like Yasmini in all the world!"
+
+The Rangar was looking past them, facing the great gorge that lets
+the North of Asia trickle down into India and back again when weather
+and the tribes permit.  His eyes had become interested in the distance.
+King wondered why--and looked--and saw. Courtenay saw, too.
+
+"Hail that man and bring him here!" he ordered.
+
+Ismail, keeping his distance with ears and eyes peeled, heard
+instantly and hurried off.  He went like the wind and all three
+watched in silence for ten minutes while he headed off a man near
+the mouth of the Pass, stopped him, spoke to him and brought him along.
+Fifteen minutes later an Afridi stood scowling in front of them with
+a little letter in a cleft stick in his hand.  He held it out and
+Courtenay took it and sniffed.
+
+"Well--I'll be blessed!  A note'--sniff--sniff--"on scented paper!"
+Sniff--sniff!  "Carried down the Khyber in a split stick!  Take it,
+King--it's addressed to you."
+
+King obeyed and sniffed too.  It smelt of something far more subtle
+than musk.  He recognized the same strange scent that had been
+wafted from behind Yasmini's silken hangings in her room in Delhi.
+As he unfolded the note--it was not sealed--he found time for a
+swift glance at Rewa Gunga's face.  The Rangar seemed interested
+and amused.
+
+        "Dear Captain King," the note ran, in English.  "Kindly
+        be quick to follow me, because there is much talk of a
+        lashkar getting ready for a raid.  I shall wait for
+        you in Khinjan, whither my messenger shall show the way.
+        Please let him keep his rifle.  Trust him, and Rewa
+        Gunga and my thirty whom you brought with you.  The
+        messenger's name is Darya Khan.
+                "Your servant,
+                        "Ysamini."
+
+He passed the note to Courtenay, who read it and passed it back.
+
+"Are you the messenger who is to show this sahib the road to Khinjan?"
+he asked.
+
+"Aye!"
+
+"But you are one of three who left here and went up the Pass at dawn!
+I recognize you."
+
+"Aye!" said the man.  "She met me and gave me this letter and sent
+me back."
+
+"How great is the lashkar that is forming?" asked Courtenay.
+ 
+"Some say three thousand men.  They speak truth.  They who say
+five thousand are liars.  There is a lashkar."
+
+"And she went up alone?" King murmured aloud in Pashtu.
+
+"Is the moon alone in the sky?" the fellow asked, and King smiled
+at him.
+
+"Let us hurry after her, sahib!" urged Rewa Gunga, and King looked
+straight into his eyes, that were like pools of fire, just as they had
+been that night in the room in Delhi.  He nodded and the Rangar grinned.
+
+"Better wait until dawn," advised Courtenay.  "The Pass is supposed
+to be closed at dusk."
+ 
+"I shall have to ask for special permission, sir."
+
+"Granted, of course."
+
+"Then, we'll start at eight to-night!" said King, glancing at his
+watch and snapping the gold case shut.
+
+"Dine with me," said Courtenay.
+
+"Yes, please.  Got to pack first.  Daren't trust anybody else."
+
+"Very well.  We'll dine in my tent at six-thirty," said Courtenay.
+"So long!"
+
+"So long, sir," said King, and each went about his own business,
+King with the Rangar, and Ismail and all thirty prisoners at his
+heels, and Courtenay alone, but that much more determined.
+
+"I'll find out," the major muttered, "how she got up the Pass without
+my knowing it.  Somebody's tail shall be twisted for this!"
+
+But he did not find out until King told him, and that was many days
+later, when a terrible cloud no longer threatened India from the North.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+
+
+Oh, a broken blade, 
+And an empty bag,
+And a sodden kit,
+And a foundered nag,
+And a whimpering wind
+Are more or less
+Ground for a gentleman's distress.
+Yet the blade will cut,
+(He should swing with a will!)
+And the emptiest bag
+He may readiest fill;
+And the nag will trot
+If the man has a mind,
+So the kit he may dry
+In the whimpering wind.
+Shades of a gallant past--confess!
+How many fights were won with less?
+
+
+I think I envy you!" said Courtenay.
+
+They were seated in Courtenay's tent, face to face across the low
+table, with guttering lights between and Ismail outside the tent
+handing plates and things to Courtenay's servant inside.
+
+"You're about the first who has admitted it," said King.
+
+Not far from them a herd of pack-camels grunted and bubbled after
+the evening meal.  The evening breeze brought the smoke of dung
+fires down to them, and an Afghan--one of the little crowd of
+traders who had come down with the camels three hours ago--sang a
+wailing song about his lady-love.  Overhead the sky was like black
+velvet, pierced with silver holes.
+
+"You see, you can't call our end of this business war--it's sport,"
+said Courtenay.  "Two battalions of Khyber Rifles, hired to hold
+the Pass against their own relations.  Against them a couple of
+hundred thousand tribesmen, very hungry for loot, armed with up-to-
+date rifles, thanks to Russia yesterday and Germany to-day, and
+all perfectly well aware that a world war is in progress.  That's
+sport, you know--not the 'image and likeness of war' that Jorrocks
+called it, but the real red root.  And you've got a mystery thrown
+in to give it piquancy.  I haven't found out yet how Yasmini got
+up the Pass without my knowledge.  I thought it was a trick.  Didn't
+believe she'd gone.  Yet all my mer swear they know she has gone,
+and not one of them will own to having seen her go!  What d'you
+think of that ?"
+
+"Tell you later," said King, "when I've been in the 'Hills' a while."
+
+"What d'you suppose I'm going to say, eh?  Shall I enter in my diary
+that a chit came down the Pass from a woman who never went up it?
+Or shall I say she went up while I was looking the other way?"
+
+"Help yourself!" laughed King.
+
+"Laugh on!  I envy you! I f the worst comes to the worst, you'll
+have had the best end of it.  If you fail up there in the 'Hills'
+you'll get scoughed and be done with you.  You'll at least have
+had a show.  All we shall know of your failure will be the arrival
+of the flood!  We'll be swamped ingloriously--shot, skinned alive
+and crucified without a chance of doing anything but wait for it!
+You're in luck--you can move about and keep off the fidgets!"
+
+For a while, as he ate Courtenay's broiled quail, King did not answer.
+But the merry smile had left his eyes and he seemed for once to be
+letting his mind dwell on conditions as they concerned himself.
+
+"How many men have you at the fort?" he asked at last.
+
+"Two hundred.  Why?"
+
+"All natives?"
+
+"To a man."
+
+        "Like 'em?"
+
+"What's the use of talking?" answered Courtenay.  "You know what
+it means when men of an alien race stand up to you and grin when
+they salute.  They're my own."
+
+King nodded. "Die with you, eh?"
+
+"To the last man," said Courtenay quietly with that conviction that
+can only be arrived at in one way, and that not the easiest.
+
+"I'd die alone," said King.  "It'll be lonely in the 'Hills.'  Got
+any more quail?"
+
+And that was all he ever did say on that subject, then or at any
+other time.
+
+"Here's to her!" laughed Courtenay at last, rising and holding up
+his glass.         "We can't explain her, so let's drink to her!  No
+heel-taps!  Here's to Rewa Gunga's mistress, Yasmini!"
+
+"May she show good hunting!" answered King, draining his glass;
+and it was his first that day.  "If it weren't for that note of
+hers that came down the Pass, and for one or two other things, I'd
+almost believe her a myth--one of those supposititious people who
+are supposed to express some ideal or other.  Not an hallucination,
+you understand--nor exactly an embodied spirit, either. Perhaps
+the spirit of a problem.  Let y be the Khyber district, z the tribes,
+and x the spirit of the rumpus.  Find x. Get me?"
+
+"Not exactly.  Got quinine in your kit, by the way?"
+
+"Plenty, thanks."
+
+"What shall you do first after you get up the Pass?  Call on your
+brother at Ali Masjid?  He's likely to know a lot by the time you
+get there."
+
+"Not sure," said King.  "May and may not.  I'd like to see him.
+Haven't seen the old chap in a donkey's age.  How is he?"
+
+"Well two days ago," said Courtenay.  "What's your general plan?"
+
+"Hunt!" said King.  "Hunt for x and report.  Hunt for the spirit
+of the coming ruction and try to scrag it!  Live in the open when
+I can, sleep with the lice when it rains or snows, eat dead goat
+and bad bread, I expect;  scratch myself when I'm not looking, and
+take a tub at the first opportunity.  When you see me on my way back,
+have a bath made ready for me, will you--and keep to windward!"
+
+"Certainly!" said Courtenay.  "What's the Rangar going to do with
+that mare of his?  Suppose he'll leave her at Ali Masjid?  He'll
+have to leave her somewhere on the way.  She'll get stolen.  Gad!
+That's the brightest notion yet!  I'll make a point of buying her
+from the first horse-thief who comes traipsing down the Pass!"
+
+"Here's wishing you luck!" said King.  "It's time to go, sir."
+
+He rose, and Courtenay walked with him to where his party waited
+in the dark, chilled by the cold wind whistling down the Khyber.
+Rewa Gunga sat, mounted, at their head, and close to him his personal
+servant rode another horse.  Behind them were the mules, and then
+in a cluster, each with a load of some sort on his head, were the
+thirty prisoners, and Ismail took charge of them officiously.  Darya
+Khan, the man who had brought the letter down the Pass, kept close
+to Ismail.
+
+"Are you armed?" King asked, as soon as he could see the whites of
+the Rangar's eyes through the gloom.
+
+"You jolly well bet I am!" the Rangar laughed.
+ 
+King mounted, and Courtenay shook hands;  then he went to Rewa
+Gunga's side and shook hands with him, too.
+
+"Good-by!" called King.
+
+"Good-by and good luck!"
+
+"Forward! March!" King ordered, and the little procession started.
+
+"Oh, men of the 'Hills,' ye look like ghosts--like graveyard ghosts!"
+jeered Courtenay, as they all filed past him.  "Ye look like dead men,
+going to be judged!"
+
+Nobody answered.  They strode behind the horses, with the swift
+silent strides of men who are going home to the "Hills";  but even
+they, born in the "Hills"' and knowing them as a wolf-pack knows
+its hunting-ground, were awed by the gloom of Khyber-mouth ahead.
+King's voice was the first to break the silence, and he did not
+speak until Courtenay was out of ear-shot.  Then:
+
+"Men of the 'Hills'!" he called. "Kuch dar nahin hai!"
+
+"Nahin hai! Hah!" shouted Ismail.  "So speaks a man!  Hear that, ye
+mountain folk!  He says, 'There is no such thing as fear!' "
+
+In his place in the lead, King whistled softly to himself;  but
+he drew an automatic pistol from its place beneath his armpit and
+transferred it to a readier position.
+
+Fear or no fear, Khyber-mouth is haunted after dark by the men whose
+blood-feuds are too reeking raw to let them dare go home and for
+whom the British hangman very likely waits a mile or two farther
+south.  It is one of the few places in the world where a pistol
+is better than a thick stick.
+
+Boulder, crag and loose rock faded into gloom behind;  in front
+on both hands ragged hillsides were beginning to close in;  and
+the wind, whose home is in Allah's refuse heap, whistled as it
+searched busily among the black ravines.  Then presently the shadow
+of the thousand-foot-high Khyber walls began to cover them, and
+King drew rein to count them all and let them close up.  To have let
+them straggle after that point would be tantamount to murder probably.
+
+"Ride last!" he ordered Rewa Gunga.  "You've got the only other pistol,
+haven't you?"
+
+Darya Khan, who had brought the letter, had a rifle;  so King gave
+him a roving commission on the right flank.
+
+They moved on again after five minutes, in the same deep silence,
+looking like ghosts in search of somebody to ferry them across
+the Styx.  Only the glow of King's cheroot, and the lesser, quicker
+fire of Rewa Gunga's cigarette, betrayed humanity, except that once
+or twice King's horse would put a foot wrong and be spoken to.
+
+"Hold up!"
+
+But from five or ten yards away that might have been a new note
+in the gaining wind or even nothing.
+
+After a while King's cheroot went out, and be threw it away.  A
+little later Rewa Gunga threw away his cigarette.  After that, the
+veriest five-year-old among the Zakka Khels, watching sleepless
+over the rim of some stone watch-tower, could have taken oath that
+the Khyber's unburied dead were prowling in search of empty graves.
+Probably their uncanny silence was their best protection;  but Rewa
+Gunga chose to break it after a time.
+
+"King sahib!" he called softly, repeating it louder and more loudly
+until King heard him.  "Slowly!  Not so fast!"
+ 
+"Why?"
+
+King did not check speed by a fraction, but the Rangar legged his
+mare into a canter and forced him to pull out to the left of the
+track and make room.
+
+"Because, sahib, there are men among those boulders, and to go too
+fast is to make them think you are afraid!  To seem afraid is to
+invite attack!  Can we defend ourselves, with three firearms
+between us?  Look!  What was that?"
+
+They were at the point where the road begins to lead up-hill,
+westward, leaving the bed of a ravine and ascending to join the
+highway built by British engineers.  Below, to left and right,
+was pit-mouth gloom, shadows amid shadows, full of eerie whisperings,
+and King felt the short hair on his neck begin to rise.
+
+So he urged his horse forward, because what Rewa Gunga said is true.
+There is only one surer key to trouble in the Khyber than to seem
+afraid--and that is to be afraid.  And to have sat his horse there
+listening to the Rangar's whisperings and trying to see through
+shadows would have been to invite fear, of the sort that grows
+into panic.
+
+The Rangar followed him, close up, and both horse and mare sensed
+excitement.  The mare's steel shoes sent up a shower of sparks,
+and King turned to rebuke the Rangar.  Yet he did not speak.  Never,
+in all the years he had known India and the borderland beyond, had
+he seen eyes so suggestive of a tiger's in the dark!  Yet they were
+not the same color as a tiger's, nor the same size, nor the same shape!
+
+"Look, sahib!"
+
+"Look at what?"
+
+"Look!"
+
+After a second or two he caught a glimpse of bluish flame that
+flashed suddenly and died again, somewhere below to the right.
+Then all at once the flame burned brighter and steadier and began
+to move and to grow.
+
+"Halt!" King thundered;  and his voice was as sharp and unexpected
+as a pistol-crack.  This was something tangible, that a man could
+tackle--a perfect antidote for nerves.
+
+The blue light continued on a zigzag course, as if a man were running
+among boulders with an unusual sort of torch;  and as there was
+no answer King drew his pistol, took about thirty seconds' aim and
+fired.  He fired straight at the blue light.
+
+It vanished instantly, into measureless black silence.
+
+"Now you've jolly well done it, haven't you!"' the Rangar laughed
+in his ear.  "That was her blue light--Yasmini's!"
+
+It was a minute before King answered, for both animals were all
+but frantic with their sense of their riders' state of mind;  it
+needed horsemanship to get them back under control.
+
+"How do you know whose light it was?" King demanded, when the horse
+and mare were head to head again.
+
+"It was prearranged.  She promised me a signal at the point where
+I am to leave the track!"
+
+"Where's that guide?" demanded King;  and Darya Khan came forward
+out of the night, with his rifle cocked and ready.
+
+"Did she not say Khinjan is the destination?"'
+
+"Aye!" the fellow answered.
+ 
+"I know the way to Khinjan.  That is not it.  Get down there and
+find out what that light was.  Shout back what you find!"
+
+The man obeyed instantly and sprang down into darkness.  But King
+had hardly given the order when shame told him he had sent a native
+on an errand he had no liking for himself.
+
+"Come back!" he shouted. "I'll go."
+
+But the man had gone, slipping noiselessly in the dark from rock
+to rock.
+
+So King drove both spurs home, and set his unwilling horse to
+scrambling downward at an angle he could not guess, into blackness
+he could feel, trusting the animal to find a footing where his own
+eyes could make out nothing.
+
+To his disgust he heard the Rangar follow immediately.  To his
+even greater disgust the black mare overtook him.  And even then,
+with his own mount stumbling and nearly pitching him headforemost
+at each lurch, he was forced to admire the mare's goatlike agility,
+for she descended into the gorge in running leaps, never setting
+a wrong foot.  When he and his horse reached the bottom at last
+he found the Rangar waiting for him.
+
+"This way, sahib!"
+
+The next he knew sparks from the black mare's heels were kicking
+up in front of him, and a wild ride had begun such as he had never
+yet dreamed of.  There was no catching up, for the black mare could
+gallop two to his horse's one;  but be set his teeth and followed
+into solid night, trusting ear, eye, guesswork and the God of Secret
+Service men who loves the reckless.
+
+Once in a minute or so be would see a spark, or a shower of them,
+where the mare took a turn in a hurry.  Once in every two or three
+minutes he caught sight for a second of the same blue siren light
+that had started the race.  He suspected that there were many torches
+placed at intervals.  It could not be one man running.  More than
+once it occurred to him to draw and shoot, but that thought died
+into the darkness whence it came.  Never once while he rode did
+he forget to admire the Rangar's courage or the black mare's speed.
+
+His own horse developed a speed and stamina he had not suspected,
+and probably the Rangar did not dare extend the mare to her limit
+in the dark;  at all events, for ten, perhaps fifteen, minutes of
+breathless galloping he almost made a race of it, keeping the Rangar,
+either within sight or sound.
+
+But then the mare swerved suddenly behind a boulder and was gone.
+He spurred round the same great rock a minute later, and was faced
+by a blank wall of shale that brought his horse up all standing.
+It led steep up for a thousand feet to the sky-line.  There was
+not so much as a goat-track to show in which direction the mare
+had gone, nor a sound of any kind to guide him.
+
+He dismounted and stumbled about on foot for about ten minutes with
+his eyes two feet from the earth, trying to find some trace of hoof.
+Then he listened, with his ear to the ground.  There was no result.
+
+He knew better than to shout, for that would sound like a cry of
+distress, and there is no mercy whatever in the "Hills" for lost
+wanderers, or for men who seem lost.  He had not a doubt there were
+men with long jezails lurking not far away, to say nothing of those
+responsible for the blue torchlight.
+
+After some thought be mounted and began to hunt the way back,
+remembering turns and twists with a gift for direction that natives
+might well have envied him.  He found his way back to the foot of
+the road at a trot, where ninety-nine men out of almost any hundred
+would have been lost hopelessly;  and close to the road he overtook
+Darya Khan, hugging his rifle and staring about like a scorpion at bay.
+
+"Did you expect that blue light, and this galloping away?" he asked.
+
+"Nay, sahib;  I knew nothing of it!  I was told to lead the way
+to Khinjan."
+
+"Come on, then!"
+
+He set his horse at the boulder-strewn slope and had to dismount
+to lead him at the end of half a minute.  At the end of a minute
+both he and the messenger were hauling at the reins and the horse
+had grown frantic from fear of falling backward.  He shouted for help,
+and Ismail and another man came leaping down, looking like the devils
+of the rocks, to lend their strength.  Ismail tightened his long
+girdle and stung the other two with whiplash words, so that Darya
+Khan overcame prejudice to the point of stowing his rifle between
+some rocks and lending a hand.  Then it took all four of them fifteen
+minutes to heave and haul the struggling animal to the level road above.
+
+There, with eyes long grown used to the dark, King stared about him,
+recovering his breath and feeling in his pockets for a fresh cheroot
+and matches.  He struck a match and watched it to be sure his hand
+did not shake before he spoke, because one of Cocker's rules is
+that a man must command himself before trying it on others.
+
+"Where are the others?" he asked, when he was certain of himself.
+
+"Gone!" boomed Ismail, still panting, for he had heaved and dragged
+more stoutly than had all the rest together.
+
+King took a dozen pulls at the cheroot and stared about again.  In
+the middle of the road stood his second horse, and three mules with
+his baggage, including the unmarked medicine chest.  Close to them
+were three men, making the party now only six all told, including
+Darya Khan, himself and Ismail.
+
+"Gone whither?" he asked.
+
+"Whither?"
+
+Ismail's voice was eloquent of shocked surprise.
+
+"They followed!  Was it then thy baggage on the other mules?  Were
+they thy men?  They led the mules and went!"
+
+"Who ordered them?"
+
+"Allah!  Need the night be ordered to follow the Day?"
+
+"Who told them whither to go?"
+
+"Who told the moon where the night was?" Ismail answered.
+
+"And thou?"
+
+"I am thy man!  She bade me be thy man!"
+
+"And these?"
+
+"Try them!"
+
+King bethought him of his wrist, that was heavy with the weight
+of gold on it.  He drew back his sleeve and held it up.
+
+"May God be with thee!" boomed all five men at once, and the Khyber
+night gave back their voices, like the echoing of a well.
+ 
+King took his reins and mounted.
+
+"What now?" asked Ismail, picking up the leather bag that he regarded
+as his own particular charge.
+ 
+"Forward!" said King.  "Come along!"
+
+He began to set a fairly fast pace, Ismail leading the spare horse
+and the others towing the mules along.  Except for King, who was
+modern and out of the picture, they looked like Old Testament
+patriarchs, hurrying out of Egypt, as depicted in the illustrated
+Bibles of a generation ago--all leaning forward--each man carrying
+a staff--and none looking to the right or left.
+
+After a time the moon rose and looked at them from over a distant
+ridge that was thousands of feet higher than the ragged fringe of
+Khyber wall.  The little mangy jackals threw up their heads to howl
+at it;  and after that there was pale light diffused along the track,
+and they could see so well that King set a faster pace, and they
+breathed hard in the effort to keep up.  He did not draw rein until
+it was nearly time for the Pass to begin narrowing and humping upward
+to the narrow gut at Ali Masjid.  But then he halted suddenly.  The
+jackals had ceased howling, and the very spirit of the Khyber seemed
+to hold its breath and listen.
+
+In that shuddersome ravine unusual sounds will rattle along sometimes
+from wall to wall and gully to gully, multiplying as they go, until
+night grows full of thunder.  So it was now that they heard a staccato
+cannonade--not very loud yet, but so quick, so pulsating, so filling
+to the ears that be could judge nothing about the sound at all,
+except that whatever caused it must be round a corner out of sight.
+
+At first, for a few minutes King suspected it was Rewa Gunga's mare,
+galloping over hard rock away ahead of him.  Then he knew it was
+a horse approaching.  After that he became nearly sure he was mistaken
+altogether and that the drums were being beaten at a village--until
+he remembered there was no village near enough and no drums in any case.
+
+It was the behavior of the horse he rode, and of the led one and
+the mules, that announced at last beyond all question that a horse
+was coming down the Khyber in a hurry. One of the mules brayed until
+the whole gorge echoed with the insult, and a man hit him hard on
+the nose to silence him.
+
+King legged his horse into the shadow of a great rock.  And after
+shepherding the men and mules into another shadow, Ismail came and
+held his stirrup, with the leather bag in the other hand.  The bag
+fascinated him, because he did not know what was in it, and it was
+plain that he meant to cling to it until death or King should put
+an end to curiosity.
+
+King drew his pistol.  Ismail drew in his breath with a hissing sound,
+as if he and not King were the marksman.  King notched the foresight
+against the corner of a crag, at a height that ought to be an inch
+or two above an oncoming horse's ears, and Ismail nodded sagely.
+Whoever now should gallop round that rock would be obliged to cross
+the line of fire.  Such are the vagaries of the Khyber's night echoes
+that it was a long five minutes yet before a man appeared at last,
+riding like the night wind, on a horse that seemed to be very nearly on
+his last legs.  The beast was going wildly, sobbing, with straggled ears.
+
+Instead of speaking, King spurred out of the shadow and blocked
+the oncoming horseman's way, making his own horse meet the other
+shoulder to breast, knocking most of the remaining wind out of him.
+At risk of his own life, Ismail seized the man's reins.  The sparks
+flew, and there was a growled oath;  but the long and the short
+of it was that the rider squinted uncomfortably down the barrel
+of King's repeating pistol.
+
+"Give an account of yourself!" commanded King.
+
+The man did not answer.  He was a jezailchi of the Khyber Rifles--
+hook-nosed as an osprey--black-bearded--with white teeth glistening
+out of a gap in the darkness of his lower face.  And he was armed
+with a British government rifle, although that is no criterion in
+that borderland of professional thieves where many a man has offered
+himself for enlistment with a stolen government rifle in his grasp.
+
+The waler he rode was an officer's charger.  The poor brute sobbed
+and heaved and sweated in his tracks as his rightful owner surely
+had never made him do.
+
+"Whither?" King demanded.
+
+"Jamrud!"
+
+The jezailchi growled the one-word answer with one eye on King, but
+the other eye still squinted down the pistol barrel warily.
+
+"Have you a letter?"
+
+The man did not answer.
+
+"You may speak to me.  I am of your regiment.  I am Captain King."
+
+"That is a lie, and a poor one!" the fellow answered.  "But a very
+little while ago I spoke with King sahib in Ali Masjid Fort, and
+he is no cappitin, he is leftnant.  Therefore thou art a liar twice
+over--nay, three times!  Thou art no officer of Khyber Rifles!  I
+am a jezailchi, and I know them all!"
+
+"None the less," said King,  "I am an officer of the Khyber Rifles,
+newly appointed.  I asked you, have you a letter?"
+
+"Aye!"
+
+"Let me see it."
+
+"Nay!"
+
+"I order you!"
+
+"Nay!  I am a true man!  I will eat the letter rather!"
+
+"Tell me who wrote it, then."
+
+But the fellow shook his head, still eying the pistol as if it were
+a snake about to strike.
+
+"I have eaten the salt!" he said.  "May dogs eat me if I break faith!
+Who art thou, to ask me to break faith?  An arrficer?  That must
+be a lie!  The letter is from him who wrote it, to whom I bear it--
+and that is my answer if I die this minute!"
+
+King let his reins fall and raised his left wrist until the moonlight
+glinted on the gold of his bracelet under the jezailchi's very eyes.
+
+"May God be with thee!" said the man at once.
+
+"From whom is your letter, and to whom?" asked King, wondering what
+the men in the clubs at home would say if they knew that a woman's
+bracelet could outweigh authority on British sod;  for the Khyber
+Pass is as much British as the air is an eagle's or Korea Japanese,
+or Panama United States American, and the Khyber jezailchis are
+paid to help keep it so.
+
+"From the karnal sahib (colonel) at Landi Kotal, whose horse I ride,"
+said the jezailchi slowly, "to the arrficer at Jamrud.  To King sahib,
+the arrficer at Ali Masjid I bore a letter also, and left it as
+I passed."
+
+"Had they no spare horse at Ali Masjid?  That beast is foundered."
+
+"There are two horses there, and both lame.  The man who thou sayest
+is thy brother is heavy on horses."
+
+King nodded.  "What is in the letter?" he asked.
+
+"Nay!  Have I eyes that can see through paper?"
+ 
+"Thou hast ears that can listen!" answered King.
+
+"In the letter that I left at Ali Masjid there is news of the lashkar
+that is gathering in the 'Hills,' above Ali Masjid and beyond Khinjan.
+King sahib is ordered to be awake and wary."
+
+"And to lame no more horses jumping them over rocks!"
+
+"Nay, the karnal sahib said he is to ride after no more jackals
+with a spear!"
+
+"Same old game!" said King to himself.  "What knowest thou of the
+lashkar that is gathering?"
+
+"I?  Oh, a little.  An uncle of mine, and three half-brothers, and
+a brother are of its number!  One came at night to tempt me to join--
+but I have eaten the salt.  It was I who first warned our karnal sahib.
+Now, let me by!"
+
+"Nay, wait!" ordered King.  But he lowered his pistol point.
+
+To hold up a despatch rider was about as irregular as any proceeding
+could be;  but it was within his province to find out how far the
+Khyber jezailchis could be trusted and within his power more than
+to make up the lost time.  So that the irregularity did not trouble
+him much.
+
+"Does this other letter tell of the lashkar, too?"
+
+"Am I God, that I should know?  But of what else should the karnal
+sahib write?"
+
+"What is the object of the rising?" King asked him next;  and the
+man threw his head back to laugh like a wolf.  Laughter, at night
+in the Khyber, is an insult.  Ismail chattered into his beard;  but
+King sat still.
+
+"Object?  What but to force the Khyber and burst through into India
+and loot?  What but to plunder, now that English backs are turned
+the other way?"
+
+"Who said their backs are turned?" demanded King.
+
+"Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ho!  Hear him!"
+
+The Khyber echoed the mockery away and away into the distance.
+
+"Their backs are this way and their faces that!  The kites know it!
+The vultures know it!  The little jackals know it!  The little
+butchas in the valley villages all know it!  Ask the rocks, and
+the grass--the very water running from the 'Hills'!  They all know
+that the English fight for life!"
+
+"And the Khyber jezailchis?  What of them?" King asked.
+
+"They know it better than any!"
+
+"And?"
+
+"They make ready, even as I."
+
+"For what?"
+
+"For what Allah shall decide!  We ate the salt, we jezailchis.  We
+chose, and we ate of our own free will.  We have been paid the price
+we named, in silver and rifles and clothing.  The arrficers the
+sirkar sent us are men of faith who have made no trouble with our women.
+What, then, should the Khyber jezailchis do?  For a little while there
+will be fighting--or, if we be very brave and our arrficers skillful,
+and Allah would fain see sport, then for a longer while.  Then we
+shall be overridden.  Then the Khyber will be a roaring river of
+men pouring into India, as my father's father told me it has
+often been!  India shall bleed in these days--but there will be
+fighting in the Khyber first!"
+
+"And what of her? Of Yasmini?" King asked.
+
+"Thou wearest that--and askest what of her?  Nay--tell!"
+
+"Should she order the jezailchis to be false to the salt--?"
+ 
+"Such a question!"
+
+The man clucked into his beard and began to fidget in the saddle.
+King gave him another view of the bracelet, and again he found a
+civil answer.
+
+"We of the Rifles have her leave to be loyal to the salt, for, said she,
+otherwise how could we be true men;  and she loves no liars.  From
+the first, when she first won our hearts in the 'Hills,' she gave
+us of the Rifles leave to be true men first and her servants afterward!
+We may love her--as we do!--and yet fight against her, if so Allah
+wills--and she will yet love us!"
+
+"Where is she?" King asked him suddenly, and the man began to laugh
+again.
+
+"Let me by!" he shouted truculently.  "Who am I to sit a horse and
+gossip in the Khyber?  Let me by, I say!"
+
+"I will let you by when you have told me where she is!"
+
+"Then I die here, and very likely thou, too!" the man answered,
+bringing his rifle to the port in front of him so quickly that he
+almost had King at a disadvantage.  As it was, King was quick enough
+to balance matters by covering him with the pistol again.  The horses
+sensed excitement and began to stir.  With a laugh the jezailchi
+let the rifle fall across his lap, and at that King put the pistol
+out of sight.
+
+"Fool!" hissed Ismail in his ear;  but King knows the "Hills" better
+in some ways than the savages who live in them;  they, for instance,
+never seem able to judge. whether there will be a fight presently
+or not.
+
+"Why won't you tell me where she is?" he asked in his friendliest
+voice, and that would wheedle secrets from the Sphynx.
+
+"Her secrets are her own, and may Allah help her guard them!  I will
+tear my tongue out first!"
+
+"Enviable woman!" murmured King.  "Pass, friend!" he ordered,
+reining aside.  "Take my spare horse and leave me that weary one,
+so you will recover the lost time and more into the bargain."
+
+The man changed horses gladly, saying nothing.  When he had shifted
+the saddle and mounted, he began to ride off with a great air, not
+so much as deigning to scowl at Ismail.  But he had not ridden a
+dozen paces when he sat round in the saddle and drew rein.
+
+"Sahib!" he called.  "Sahib!"
+
+King waited.  He had waited for this very thing and could afford
+to wait a minute longer.
+
+"Hast thou--is there--does the sahib--I have not tasted--"
+
+He made a sign with his hand that men recognize in pretty nearly
+every land under the sun.
+
+"So-ho!" laughed King, patting his hip pocket, from which the cap
+of a silver-topped flask had been protruding ever since he put the
+pistol out of sight.         "So our copper's hot, eh?"
+
+"May Allah do more to me if my throat is not lined with the fires
+of Eblis!"
+
+"But the Kalamullah!" King objected.  "What saith the Prophet?"
+
+"The Prophet forbade the faithful to drink wine," said the jezailchi.
+"He said nothing about whiskey, that I ever heard!"
+
+"Mine is brandy," said King.
+
+"May Allah bless the sahib's sons and grandsons to the seventh
+generation!  May Allah--"
+
+"Tell me about Yasmini first!  Where is she?"
+
+"Nay!"
+ 
+King tapped the flask in his pocket.
+
+"Nay!  My throat is dry, but it shalt parch!  I know not!  As to
+where she is, I know not!"
+
+"Remember, and I will give you the whole of it!"
+
+He drew the flask out of his pocket and rode a little way toward
+the man.
+
+"None can overhear.  Tell me now."
+
+"Nay, sahib!  I am silent!"
+
+"Have you passed her on your way?"
+
+The man shook his head--shook it until the whites of his eyes were
+a streak in the middle of his dark face;  and when a Hillman is
+as vehement as that he is surely lying.
+
+King set the flask to his own lips and drank a few
+drops.
+
+"Salaam, sahib!" said the jezaitchi, wheeling his horse to ride away.
+
+King let him ride twenty paces before calling to him to halt.
+
+"Come back!" he ordered, and rode part of the way to meet him.
+
+"I but tried thee, friend!" he said, holding out the flask.
+
+"Allah then preserve me from a second test!"
+
+The jezailchi seized the flask, clapped it to his lips and drained
+it to the last drop while King sat still in the moonlight and smiled
+at him.
+
+"God grant the giver peace!" he prayed, handing the flask back.
+The kindly East possesses no word for "Thank you."  Then he wheeled
+the horse in a sudden eddy, as polo ponies turn on the Indian plains,
+and rode away down the wind as if the Pass were full of devils in
+pursuit of him.
+
+King watched him out of sight and then listened until the hoof-beats
+died away and the Pass grew still again.
+
+"The jezailchis'll stand!" he said, lighting a new cheroot.  "Good
+men and good luck to 'em!"
+
+Then he rode back to his own men.
+
+"Where starts the trail to Khinjan?" be asked;  not that he had
+forgotten it, but to learn who knew.
+
+"This side of Ali Masjid!" they answered all together.
+
+"Two miles this side.  More than a mile from here," said Ismail.
+"What next?  Shall we camp here?  Here is fuel and a little water.
+Give the word--"
+
+"Nay-forward!" ordered King.
+
+"Forward?" growled Ismail.  "With this man it is ever 'forward!'
+Is there neither rest nor fear?  Has she bewitched him?  Hai!  Ye
+lazy ones!  Ho!  Sons of sloth!  Urge the mules faster!  Beat the
+led horse!"
+
+So in weird wan moonlight, King led them forward, straight up the
+narrowing gorge, between cliffs that seemed to fray the very bosom
+of the sky.  He smoked a cigar and stared at the view, as if be
+were off to the mountains for a month's sport with dependable
+shikarris whom he knew.  Nobody could have looked at him and guessed
+he was not enjoying himself.
+
+"That man," mumbled Ismail behind him, "is not as other sahibs I
+have known.  He is a man, this one!  He will do unexpected things!"
+
+"Forward!" King called to them, thinking they were grumbling.
+"Forward, men of the 'Hills'!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+
+
+
+The owl he has eyes that are big for his size,
+And the night like a book he deciphers;
+"Too-woop!" he asserts, and "Hoo-woo-ip!" he cries,
+And he means to remark he is awfully wise;
+But he lags behind us, who are "on" to the lies
+Of the hairy Himalayan knifers!
+
+For eyes we be, of Empire, we,
+Skinned and puckered and quick to see,
+And nobody guesses how wise we be,
+Nor hidden in what disguise we be,
+A-cooking a sudden surprise we be
+For hairy Himahlyan knifers!
+
+
+After a time King urged his horse to a jog-trot, and the five Hillmen
+pattered in his wake, huddled so close together that the horse
+could easily have kicked more than one of them.  The night was cold
+enough to make flesh creep;  but it was imagination that herded
+them until they touched the horse's rump and kept the whites of
+their eyes ever showing as they glanced to left and right.  The
+Khyber, fouled by memory, looks like the very birthplace of the
+ghosts when the moon is fitful and a mist begins to flow.
+
+"Cheloh!" King called merrily enough;  but his horse shied at nothing,
+because horses have an uncanny way of knowing how their riders
+really feel.  They led mules and the spare horse, instead of
+dragging at their bridles, pressed forward to have their heads
+among the men, and every once and again there would sound the dull
+thump of a fist on a beast's nose--such being the attitude of men
+toward the lesser beasts.
+
+They trotted forward until the bed of the Khyber began to grow very
+narrow, and Ali Masjid Fort could not be much more than a mile away,
+at the widest guess.  Then King drew rein and dismounted, for he
+would have been challenged had he ridden much farther.  A challenge
+in the Khyber after dark consists invariably of a volley at short
+range, with the mere words afterward, and the wise man takes precaution.
+
+"Off with the mules' packs!" he ordered, and the men stood round
+and stared.  Darya Khan, leaning on the only rifle in the party,
+grinned like a post-office letter box.
+
+"Truly," growled Ismail, forgetting past expression of a different
+opinion, "this man is as mad as all the other Englishmen."
+
+"Were you ever bitten by one?" wondered King aloud.
+
+"God forbid!"
+
+"Then, off with the packs--and hurry!"
+
+Ismail began to obey.
+
+"Thou!  Lord of the Rivers! (For that is what Darya Khan means.)
+What is thy calling?"
+
+"Badragga" (guide), he answered.  "Did she not send me back down
+the Pass to be a guide?"
+
+"And before that what wast thou?"
+
+"Is that thy business?" he snarled, shifting his rifle-barrel to
+the other hand.  "I am what she says I am!  She used to call me
+'Chikki'--the Lifter!--and I was!  There are those who were made
+to know it!  If she says now I am badragga, shall any say she lies?"
+
+"I say thou art unpacker of mules' burdens!" answered King.  "Begin!"
+
+For answer the fellow grinned from ear to ear and thrust the rifle-
+barrel forward insolently.  King, with the movement of determination
+that a man makes when about to force conclusions, drew up his sleeves
+above the wrist.  At that instant the moon shone through the mist
+and the gold bracelet glittered in the moonlight.
+
+"May God be with thee!" said "Lord of the Rivers" at once.  And
+without another word he laid down his rifle and went to help off-load
+the mules.
+
+King stepped aside and cursed softly.  To a man who knows how to
+enforce his own authority, it is worse than galling to be obeyed
+because he wears a woman's favor.  But for a vein of wisdom that
+underlay his pride he would have pocketed the bracelet there and
+then and have refused to wear it again.  But as he sweated his pride
+he overheard Ismail growl:
+
+"Good for thee!  He had taught thee obedience in another bat of
+the eye!"
+
+"I obey her!" muttered Darya Khan.
+
+"I, too," said Ishmail.  "So shall he before the week dies!  But
+now it is good to obey him.  He is an ugly man to disobey!"
+
+"I obey him until she sets me free, then," grumbled Darya Khan.
+
+"Better for thee!" said Ismail.
+
+The packs were laid on the ground, and the mules shook themselves,
+while the jackals that haunt the Khyber came closer, to sit in a
+ring and watch.  King dug a flashlight out of one of the packs,
+gave it to Ismail to hold, sat on the other pack and began to write
+on a memorandum pad.  It was a minute before he could persuade
+Ismail that the flashlight was harmless, and another minute before
+he could get him to hold it still.  Then, however, he wrote swiftly.
+
+        "In the Khyber, a mile below you.
+        "Dear Old Man--I would like to run in and see you, but
+        circumstances don't permit.  Several people sent you
+        their regards by me.  Herewith go two mules and their
+        packs.  Make any use of the mules you like, but store
+        the loads where I can draw on them in case of need.
+        I would like to have a talk with you before taking the
+        rather desperate step I intend, but I don't want to be
+        seen entering or leaving Ali Masjid.  Can you come
+        down the Pass without making your intention known?
+        It is growing misty now.  It ought to be easy.  My men
+        will tell you where I am and show you the way.  Why
+        not destroy this letter?
+        --"Athelstan."
+
+He folded the note and stuck a postage stamp on it in lieu of seal.
+Then he examined the packs with the aid of the flashlight, sorted
+them and ordered two of the mules reloaded.
+
+"You three!" he ordered then.  "Take the loaded mules into Ali Masjid
+Fort.  Take this chit, you.  Give it to the sahib in command there."
+
+They stood and gaped at him, wide-eyed--then I came closer to see
+his eyes and to catch any whisper that Ismail might have for them.
+But Ismail and Darya Khan seemed full of having been chosen to stay
+behind;  they offered no suggestions--certainly no encouragement
+to mutiny.
+
+"To hear is to obey!" said the nearest man, seizing the note, for
+at all events that was the easiest task.  His action decided the
+other two.  They took the mules' leading-reins and followed him.
+Before they had gone ten paces they were all swallowed in the mist
+that had begun to flow southeastward;  it closed on them like a
+blanket, and in a minute more the clink of shod hooves had ceased.
+The night grew still, except for the whimpering of jackals.  Ismail
+came nearer and squatted at King's feet.
+
+"Why, sahib?" he asked:  and Darya Khan came closer, too.  King
+had tied the reins of the two horses and the one remaining mule
+together in a knot and was sitting on the pack.
+
+"Why not?" he countered.
+
+Solemn, almost motionless, squatted on their hunkers, they looked
+like two great vultures watching an animal die.
+
+"What have they done that they should be sent away?" asked Ismail. 
+"What have they done that they should be sent to the fort, where
+the arrficer will put them in irons?"
+
+"Why should he put them in irons?" asked King.
+
+"Why not?  Here in the Khyber there is often a price on men's heads!"
+
+"And not in Delhi?"
+
+"In Delhi these were not known.  There were no witnesses in Delhi.
+In the fort at Ali Masjid there will be a dozen ready to swear to them!"
+
+"Then, why did they obey?" asked King.
+
+"What is that on the sahib's wrist?"
+
+"You mean--?"
+
+"Sahib--if she said, 'Walk into the fire or over that Cliff!' there
+be many in these 'Hills' who would obey without murmuring!"
+
+"I have nothing against them," said King.  As long as they are my
+men I will not send them into a trap."
+
+"Good!" nodded Ismail and Darya Khan together, but they did not
+seem really satisfied.
+
+"It is good," said Ismail, "that she should have nothing against thee,
+sahib!  Those three men are in thy keeping!"
+
+"And I in thine?" King asked, but neither man answered him.
+
+They sat in silence for five minutes.  Then suddenly the two Hillmen
+shuddered, although King did not bat an eyelid.  Din burst into being.
+A volley ripped out of the night and thundered down the Pass.
+
+"How-utt! Hukkums dar?" came the insolent challenge half a minute
+after it--the proof positive that Ali Masjid's guards neither slept
+nor were afraid.
+
+A weird wail answered the challenge, and there began a tossing to
+and fro of words, that was prelude to a shouted invitation:
+
+"Ud-vance-frrrennen-orsss-werrul!"
+
+English can be as weirdly distorted as wire, or any other supple
+medium, and native levies advance distortion to the point of art;
+but the language sounds no less good in the chilly gloom of a
+Khyber night.
+
+Followed another wait, this time of half an hour.  Then a man's
+footsteps--a booted, leather-heeled man, striding carelessly.  Not
+far behind him was the softer noise of sandals.  The man began to
+whistle Annie Laurie.
+
+"Charles?  That you?" called King.
+
+"That you, old man?"
+
+A man in khaki stepped into the moonlight.  He was so nearly the
+image of Athelstan King that Ismail and Darya Khan stood up and stared.
+Athelstan strode to meet him.  Their walk was the same.  Angle for
+angle, line for line, they might have been one man and his shadow,
+except for three-quarters of an inch of stature.
+
+"Glad to see you, old man," said Athelstan.
+
+"Sure, old chap!" said Charles;  and they shook hands.
+
+"What's the desperate proposal?" asked the younger.
+
+"I'll tell you when we are alone."
+ 
+His brother nodded and stood a step aside.  The three who had taken
+the note to the fort came closer--partly to call attention to
+themselves, partly to claim credit, partly because the outer silence
+frightened them.  They elbowed Ismail and Darya Khan, and one of
+them received a savage blow in the stomach by way of retort from
+Ismail.  Before that spark could start an explosion Athelstan interfered.
+
+"Ismail!  Take two men.  Go down the Pass out of car-shot, and keep
+watch!  Come back when I whistle thus--but no sooner!"
+
+He put fingers between his teeth and blew until the night shrilled
+back at him.  Ismail seized the leather bag and started to obey.
+
+"Leave that bag.  Leave it, I say!"
+
+"But some man may steal it, sahib.  How shall a thief know there
+is no money in it?"
+
+"Leave it and go!"
+
+Ismail departed, grumbling, and King turned on Darya Khan.
+
+"Take the remaining man, and go up the Pass!" he ordered.  "Stand
+out of ear-shot and keep watch.  Come when I whistle!"
+
+"But this one has a belly ache where Ismail smote him!  Can a man
+with a belly ache stand guard?  His moaning will betray both him
+and me!" objected "Lord of the Rivers."
+
+"Take him and go!" commanded King.
+
+"But--"
+
+King was careful now not to show his bracelet.
+
+But there was something in his eye and in his attitude--a subtle
+suggestive something-or-other about him--that was rather more
+convincing than a pistol or a stick.  Darya Khan thrust his rifle-end
+into the hurt man's stomach for encouragement and started off into
+the mist.
+
+"Come and ache out of the sahibs' sight!" he snarled.
+
+In a minute King and his brother stood unseen, unheard in the shadow
+by a patch of silver moonlight.  Athelstan sat down on the mule's pack.
+ 
+"Well?" said the younger.  "Tell me.  I shall have to hurry.  You
+see I'm in charge back there.  They saw me come out, but I hope to
+teach 'em a lesson going back."
+
+Athelstan nodded.  "Good!" he said.  "I've a roving commission.  I'm
+ordered to enter Khinjan Caves."
+
+His brother whistled.  "Tall order!  What's your plan?"
+
+"Haven't one--yet.  Know more when I'm nearer Khinjan.  You can
+help no end."
+
+"How?  Name it!"
+
+"I shall go up in disguise.  Nobody can put the stain on as well
+as you.  But tell me something first.  Any news of a holy war yet?"
+
+His brother nodded.  "Plenty of talk about one to come," he said.
+"We keep hearing of that lashkar that we can't locate, under a mullah
+whose name seems to change with the day of the week.  And there
+are everlasting tales about the 'Heart of the Hills."'
+
+"No explanation of 'em?" Athelstan asked him.
+
+"None!  Not a thing!"
+
+"D'you know of Yasmini?"
+
+"Heard of her of course," said his brother.
+
+"Has she come up the Pass?"
+
+His brother laughed.  "No, neither she nor a coach and four."
+ 
+"I have heard the contrary," said Athelstan.
+
+"Heard what, exactly?"
+
+"She's up the Pass ahead of me."
+
+"She hasn't passed Ali Masjid!" said his brother, and Athelstan nodded.
+
+"Are the Turks in the show yet?" asked Charles.
+
+"Not yet.  But I know they're expected in."
+
+"You bet they're expected in!"  The younger man grinned from ear
+to ear. "They're working both tides under to prepare the tribes
+for it.  They flatter themselves they can set alight a holy war
+that will put Timour Ilang to shame.  You should hear my jezailchies
+talk at night when they think I'm not listening!"
+
+"The jezailchies'll stand though," said Athelstan.
+
+"Stake my life on it!" said his brother.  "They'll stick to the
+last man!"
+
+"I can't tell you," said Athelstan, "why we're not attacking brother
+Turk before he's ready.  I imagine Whitehall has its hands full.  But
+it's likely enough that the Turk will throw in his lot with the
+Prussians the minute he's ready to begin.  Meanwhile my job is to
+help make the holy war seem unprofitable to the tribes, so that
+they'll let the Turk down hard when he calls on 'em.  Every day
+that I can point to forts held strongly in the Khyber is a day in
+my favor.  There are sure to be raids.  In fact, the more the merrier,
+provided they're spasmodic.  We must keep 'em separated--keep 'em
+from swarming too fast--while I sow other seeds among 'em."
+
+His brother nodded. Sowing seeds was almost that family's hereditary
+job. Athelstan continued:
+
+"Hang on to Ali Masjid like a leech, old man!  The day one raiding
+lashkar gets command of the Khyber's throat, the others'll all
+believe they've won the game.  Nothing'll stop 'em then!  Look out
+for traps.  Smash 'em on sight.  But don't follow up too far!"
+
+"Sure," said Charles.
+
+"Help me with the stain now, will you?"
+
+With his flash-light burning as if its battery provided current
+by the week instead of by the minute, Athelstan dragged open the
+mule's pack and produced a host of things.  He propped a mirror
+against the pack and squatted in front of it.  Then he passed a
+little bottle to his brother, and Charles attended to the chin-strap
+mark that would have betrayed him a British officer in any light
+brighter than dusk.  In a few minutes his whole face was darkened
+to one hue, and Charles stepped back to look at it.
+
+"Won't need to wash yourself for a month!" he said.  "The dirt won't
+show!"  He sniffed at the bottle.  "But that stain won't come off
+if you do wash--never worry!  You'll do finely."
+
+"Not yet, I won't!" said Athelstan, picking up a little safety razor
+and beginning on his mustache.  In a minute he had his upper lip bare.
+Then his brother bent over him and rubbed in stain where the scrubby
+mustache had been.
+
+After that Athelstan unlocked the leather bag that had caused Ismail
+so much concern and shook out from it a pile of odds and ends at
+which his brother nodded with perfect understanding.  The principal
+item was a piece of silk--forty or fifty yards of it--that he
+proceeded to bind into a turban on his head, his brother lending
+him a guiding, understanding finger at every other turn.  When that
+was done, the man who had said he looked in the least like a British
+officer would have lied.
+
+One after another he drew on native garments, picking them from
+the pile beside him.  So, by rapid stages he developed into a native
+hakim--by creed a converted Hindu, like Rewa Gunga,--one of the
+men who practise yunani, or modern medicine, without a license and
+with a very great deal of added superstition, trickery and guesswork.
+
+"I wouldn't trust you with a ha'penny!" announced his brother when
+he had done.
+
+"Really?  As good as all that?"
+
+"The part to a T."
+
+"Well--take these into the fort for me, will you?"  His brother
+caught the bundle of discarded European clothes and tucked them
+under his arm.  "Now, re-member, old man!  This is the biggest show
+there has ever been!  We've got to hold the Khyber, and we can't
+do it by riding pell-mell into the first trap set for us!  We must
+smash when the fighting starts--but we mayn't miss!  We mayn't run
+past the mark!  Be a coward, if that's the name you care to give it.
+You needn't tell me you've got orders to hunt skirmishers to a
+standstill, because I know better.  I know you've just had your
+wig pulled for laming two horses!"
+
+"How d'you know that?"
+
+"Never mind!  I've been seconded to your crowd.  I'm your senior,
+and I'm giving you orders.  This show isn't sport, but the real
+red thing, and I want to count on you to fight like a trained man,
+not like a natural-born fool.  I want to know you're holding Ali
+Masjid like Fabius held Rome, by being slow and wily, just for the
+sake of the comfortable feeling it will give me when I'm alone
+among the 'Hills.'  Hit hard when you have to, but for God's sake,
+old man, ware traps!"
+
+"All right," said his brother.
+
+"Then good-by, old man!"
+
+"Good-by, Athelstan!"
+
+They stood facing and shook hands.  Where had been a man and his
+reflection in the mist, there now seemed to be the same man and a
+native.  Athelstan King had changed his very nature with his clothes.
+He stood like a native--moved like one;  even his voice was changed,
+as if--like the actor who dyed himself all over to act Othello--he
+could do nothing by halves.
+
+"I'm going to try to get in without my men seeing me!" said the younger.
+
+"If they do see you, they'll shoot!"
+
+"Yes, and miss!  Trust a Khyber jezailchi not to hit much in the dark!
+It'll do 'em good either way.  I'll have time to give 'em the password
+before they fire a second volley.  They're not really dangerous till
+the third one.  Good-by!"
+
+"By, Charles!"
+
+Officers in that force are not chosen for their clumsiness, or
+inability to move silently by night.  His foot-steps died in the
+mist almost as quickly as his shadow.  Before he had been gone a
+minute the Pass was silent as death again, and though Athelstan
+listened with trained ears, the only sound be could detect was of
+a jackal cracking a bone fifty or sixty yards away.
+
+He repacked the loads, putting everything back carefully into the
+big leather envelopes and locking the empty hand-bag, after throwing
+in a few stones for Ismail's benefit.  Then he went to sit in the
+moonlight, with his back to a great rock and waited there cross-legged
+to give his brother time to make good a retreat through the mist.
+When there was no more doubt that his own men, at all events, had
+failed to detect the lieutenant, he put two fingers in his mouth
+and whistled.
+
+Almost at once he heard sandals come pattering from both directions.
+As they emerged out of the mist he sat silent and still.  It was
+Darya Khan who came first and stood gaping at him, but Ismail was
+a very close second, and the other three were only a little behind.
+For full two minutes after the man with the sore stomach had come
+they all stood holding one another's arms, astonished.  Then--
+
+"Where is he?" asked Ismail.
+
+"Who?" said King, the hakim.
+
+"Our sahib--King sahib--where is he?"
+
+"Gone!"
+
+Even his voice was so completely changed that men who had been
+reared amid mutual suspicion could not recognize it.
+
+"But there are his loads!  There is his mule!"
+
+"Here is his bag!" said Ismail, pouncing on it, picking it up and
+shaking it.         "It rattles not as formerly!  There is more in it
+than there was!"
+
+"His two horses and the mule are here," said Darya Khan.
+
+"Did I say he took them with him?" asked the hakim, who sat still
+with his back to a rock.  "He went because I came!  He left me here
+in charge!  Should he not leave the wherewithal to make me comfortable,
+since I must do his work?  Hah!  What do I see?  A man bent nearly
+double?  That means a belly ache!  Who should have a belly ache
+when I have potions, lotions, balms to heal all ills, magic charms
+and talismans, big and little pills--and at such a little price!
+So small a price!  Show me the belly and pay your money!  Forget
+not the money, for nothing is free except air, water and the Word
+of God!  I have paid money for water before now, and where is the
+mullah who will not take a fee?  Nay, only air costs nothing!  For
+a rupee, then--for one rupee I will heal the sore belly and forget
+to be ashamed for taking such a little fee!"
+
+"Whither went the sahib?  Nay--show us proof!" objected Darya Khan;
+and Ismail stood back a pace to scratch his flowing beard and think.
+
+"The sahib left this with me!" said King, and held up his wrist.  The
+gold bracelet Rewa Gunga had given him gleamed in the pale moonlight.
+
+"May God be with thee!" boomed all five men together.
+
+King jumped to his feet so suddenly that all five gave way in front
+of him, and Darya Khan brought his rifle to the port.
+
+"Hast thou never seen me before?" he demanded, seizing Ismail by
+the shoulders and staring straight into his eyes.
+
+"Nay, I never saw thee!"
+
+"Look again!"
+
+He turned his head, to show his face in profile.
+
+"Nay, I never saw thee!"
+
+"Thou, then!  Thou with the belly!  Thou!  Thou!"
+
+They all denied ever having seen him.
+
+So he stepped back until the moon shone full in his face and pulled
+off his turban, changing his expression at the same time.
+
+"Now look!"
+
+"Ma'uzbillah! (May God protect us!)"
+
+"Now ye know me?"
+
+"Hee-yee-yee!" yelled Ismail, hugging himself by the elbows and
+beginning to dance from side to side.  "Hee-yee-yee!  What said I?
+Said I not so?  Said I not this is a different man?  Said I not
+this is a good one--a man of unexpected things?  Said I not there
+was magic in the leather bag?  I shook it often, and the magic grew!
+Hee-yee-yee!  Look at him!  See such cunning!  Feel him!  Smell
+of him!  He is a good one--good!"
+
+Three of the others stood and grinned, now that their first shock
+of surprise had died away.  The fourth man poked among the packs.
+There was little to see except gleaming teeth and the whites of eyes,
+set in hairy faces in the mist.  But Ismail danced all by himself
+among the stones of Khyber road and he looked like a bearded ghoul
+out for an airing.
+
+"Hee-yee-yee!  She smelt out a good one!  Hee-yee-yee!  This is a
+man after my heart!  Hee-yee-yee!  God preserve me!  God preserve
+me to see the end of this!  This one will show sport!  Oh-yee-yee-yee!"
+
+Suddenly be closed with King and hugged him until the stout ribs
+cracked and bent inward and King sobbed for breath among the strands
+of the Afridi's beard.  He had to use knuckles and knees and feet
+to win freedom, and though he used them with all his might and hurt
+the old savage fiercely, he made no impression on his good will.
+
+"After my own heart, thou art!  Spirit of a cunning one!  Worker
+of spells!  Allah!  That was a good day when she bade me wait for thee!"
+
+King sat down again, panting.  He wanted time to get his breath
+back and a little of the ache out of his ribs, but he did not care
+to waste any more minutes, and his eyes watched the faces of the
+other four men.  He saw them slowly waken to understanding of what
+Ismail meant by "worker of spells" and "magic in the bag" and knew
+that he had even greater hold on them now than Yasmini's bracelet
+gave him.
+
+"Ma'uzbillah!" they murmured as Ismail's meaning dawned and they
+recognized a magician in their midst.  "May God protect us!"
+
+"May God protect me!  I have need of it!" said King.  "What shall
+my new name be?  Give ye me a name!"
+
+"Nay, choose thou!" urged Ismail, drawing nearer.  "We have seen
+one miracle;  now let us hear another!"
+
+"Very well.  Khan is a title of respect.  Since I wish for respect,
+I will call myself Khan.  Name me a village the first name you can
+think of--quick!"
+
+"Kurram," said Ismail, at a hazard.
+
+"Kurram is good.  Kurram I am!  Kurram Khan is my name henceforward!
+Kurram Khan the dakitar!"
+
+"But where is the sahib who came from the fort to talk?" asked the
+man whose stomach ached yet from Ismail and Darya Khan's attentions
+to it.
+
+"Gone!" announced King.  "He went with the other one!"
+
+"Went whither?  Did any see him go?"
+
+"Is that thy affair?" asked King, and the man collapsed.  It is
+not considered wise to the north of Jamrud to argue with a wizard,
+or even with a man who only claims to be one.  This was a man who
+had changed his very nature almost under their eyes.
+
+"Even his other clothes have gone!" murmured one man, he who had
+poked about among the packs.
+
+"And now, Ismail, Darya Khan, ye two dunder-heads!--ye bellies
+without brains!--when was there ever a dakitar--a hakim, who had
+not two assistants
+at the least?  Have ye never seen, ye blinder-than-bats--how one
+man holds a patient while his boils are lanced, and yet another
+makes the hot iron ready?"
+
+"Aye! Aye!"
+
+They had both seen that often.
+
+"Then, what are ye?"
+
+They gaped at him.  Were they to work wonders too?  Were they to
+be part and parcel of the miracle?  Watching them, King saw
+understanding dawn behind Ismail's eyes and knew he was winning
+more than a mere admirer.  He knew it might be days yet, might be
+weeks before the truth was out, but it seemed to him that Ismail
+was at heart his friend.  And there are no friendships stronger
+than those formed in the Khyber and beyond--no more loyal partnerships.
+The "Hills" are the home of contrasts, of blood-feuds that last until
+the last-but-one man dies, and of friendships that no crime or need
+or slander can efface.  If the feuds are to be avoided like the devil,
+the friendships are worth having.
+
+"There is another thing ye might do," he suggested, "if ye two grown
+men are afraid to see a boil slit open.  Always there are timid
+patients who hang back and refuse to drink the medicines.  There
+should be one or two among the crowd who will come forward and
+swallow the draughts eagerly, in proof that no harm results.  Be
+ye two they!"
+
+Ismail spat savagely.
+
+"Nay!  Bismillah!  Nay, nay!  I will hold them who have boils,
+sitting firmly on their bellies--so--or between their shoulders--
+thus--when the boils are behind!  Nay, I will drink no draughts!
+I am a man, not a cess-pool!"
+
+"And I will study how to heat hot irons!" said Darya Khan, with
+grim conviction.  "It is likely that, having worked for a blacksmith
+once, I may learn quickly!  Phaughghgh!  I have tasted physic!  I
+have drunk Apsin Saats!  (Epsom Salts.)"
+
+He spat, too, in a very fury of reminiscence.
+
+"Good!" said King.  "Henceforward, then, I am Kurram Khan, the dakitar,
+and ye two are my assistants, Ismail to hold the men with boils,
+and Darya Khan to heat the irons--both of ye to be my men and support
+me with words when need be!"
+
+"Aye!" said Ismail, quick to think of details, "and these others
+shall be the tasters!  They have big bellies, that will hold many
+potions without crowding.  Let them swallow a little of each medicine
+in the chest now, for the sake of practise!  Let them learn not to
+make a wry face when the taste of cess-pools rests on the tongue--"
+
+"Aye, and the breath comes sobbing through the nose!" said Darya Khan,
+remembering fragments of an adventurous career.  "Let them learn
+to drink Apsin Saats without coughing!"
+
+"We will not drink the medicines!" announced the man who had a
+stomach ache.  "Nay, nay!"
+
+But Ismail hit him with the back of his hand in the stomach again
+and danced away, hugging himself and shouting "Hee-yee-yee!" until
+the jackals joined him in discontented chorus and the Khyber Pass
+became full of weird howling.  Then suddenly the old Afridi thought
+of something else and came back to thrust his face close to King's.
+
+"Why be a Rangar?  Why be a Rajput, sahib?  She loves us Hillmen better!"
+
+"Do I look like a Hillman of the 'Hills'?" asked King.
+
+"Nay, not now.  But he who can work one miracle can work another.
+Change thy skin once more and be a true Hillman!"
+
+"Aye!" King laughed. "And fall heir to a blood-feud with every
+second man I chance upon!  A Hill-man is cousin to a hundred others,
+and what say they in the 'Hills'?--'to hate like cousins,' eh?
+All cousins are at war.  As a Rangar I have left my cousins down
+in India.  Better be a converted Hindu and be despised by some than
+have cousins in the 'Hills'!  Besides--do I speak like a Hillman?"
+
+"Aye!  Never an Afridi spake his own tongue better!"
+
+"Yet--does a Hillman slip?  Would a Hillman use Punjabi words in
+a careless moment?"'
+
+"God forbid!"
+
+"Therefore, thou dunderhead, I will be a Rangar Rajput,--a stranger
+in a strange land, traveling by her favor to visit her in Khinjan!
+Thus, should I happen to make mistakes in speech or action, it may
+be overlooked, and each man will unwittingly be my advocate,
+explaining away my errors to himself and others instead of my enemy
+denouncing me to all and sundry!  Is that clear, thou oaf?"
+
+"Aye!  Thou art more cunning than any man I ever met!"
+
+The great Afridi began to rub the tips of his fingers through his
+straggly beard in a way that might mean anything, and King seemed
+to draw considerable satisfaction from it, as if it were a sign
+language that he understood.  More than any one thing in the world
+just then he needed a friend, and he certainly did not propose to
+refuse such a useful one.
+
+"And," he added, as if it were an afterthought, instead of his
+chief reason, "if her special man Rewa Gunga is a Rangar, and is
+known as a Rangar through out the 'Hills,' shall I not the more
+likely win favor by being a Rangar too?  If I wear her bracelet
+and at the same time am a Rangar, who will not trust me?"
+
+"True!  Thou art a magician!"
+
+"True!" agreed Ismail.
+
+But the moon was getting low and Khyber would be dark again in half
+an hour, for the great crags in the distance to either hand shut
+off more light than do the Khyber walls.  The mist, too, was growing
+thicker.  It was time to make a move.
+
+King rose.  "Pack the mule and bring my horse! he ordered and they
+hurried to obey with alacrity born of new respect, Darya Khan attending
+to the trimming of the mule's load in person instead of snarling
+at another man.  It was a very different little escort from the
+one that had come thus far.  Like King himself, it had changed its
+very nature in fifteen minutes!
+
+They brought the horse, and King laughed at them, calling the idiots--
+men without eyes.
+
+"The saddle?" Ismail suggested.  "It is a government arrficer's saddle."
+
+"Stolen!" said King, and they nodded.  "Stolen along with the horse!"
+
+"Then the bridle?"
+
+"Stolen too, ye men without eyes!  Ye insects!  A Stolen horse and
+saddle and bridle, are they not a passport of gentility this side
+of the border?"
+
+"Aye!"
+ 
+"I am Kurram Khan, the dakitar, but who in the 'Hills' would
+believe it?  Look now--look ye and tell me what is wrong?"
+
+He pointed to the horse, and they stood in a row and stared.
+ 
+"Shorten those stirrups, then, six holes at the least!  Men will
+laugh at me if I ride like a British arrficer!"
+
+"Aye!" said Ismail, hurrying to obey.
+
+"Aye!  Aye!  Aye!" agreed the others.
+
+"Now," he said, gathering the reins and swinging into the saddle,
+"who knows the way to Khinjan?"
+
+"Which of us does not!"
+
+"Ye all know it?  Then ye all are border thieves and worse!  No
+honest man knows that road!  Lead on, Darya Khan, thou Lord of Rivers!
+Do thy duty as badragga and beware lest we get our knees wet at the
+fords!  Ismail, you march next.  Now I.  You other two and the mule
+follow me.  Let the man with the belly ache ride last on the other
+horse.  So!  Forward march!"
+
+So Darya Khan led the way with his rifle, and King's face glowed
+in cigarette light not very far behind him as he legged his horse
+up the narrow track that led northward out of the Khyber bed.
+
+It would be a long time before he would dare smoke a cigar again,
+and his supply of cigarettes was destined to dwindle down to nothing
+before that day.  But he did not seem to mind.
+
+"Cheloh!" he called.  "Forward, men of the mountains!  Kuch dar
+nahin hai!"
+
+"Thy mother and the spirit of a fight were one!" swore Ismail just
+in front of him, stepping out like a boy going to a picnic.  "She
+will love thee!  Allah!  She will love thee!  Allah!  Allah!"
+
+The thought seemed to appal him.  For hours after that he climbed
+ahead in silence.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+
+
+Dear is the swagger that takes a man in
+        Helmeted, clattering, proud.
+Sweet are the honors the arrogant win,
+        Hot from the breath of a crowd.
+Precious the spirit that never will bend--
+        Hot challenge for insolent stare!
+But--talk when you've tried it!--to win in the end,
+Go ahsti!*  Be meek!  And beware!
+
+[* Slowly.]
+
+
+Even with the man with the stomach Ache mounted on the spare horse
+for the sake of extra speed (and he was not suffering one-fifth so
+much as he pretended);  with Ismail to urge, and King to coax, and
+the fear of mountain death on every side of them, they were the
+part of a night and a day and a night and a part of another day
+in reaching Khinjan.
+
+Darya Khan, with the rifle held in both hands, led the way swiftly,
+but warily;  and the last man's eyes looked ever backward, for many
+a sneaking enemy might have seen them and have judged a stern chase
+worth while.
+
+In the "Hills" the hunter has all the best of it, and the hunted needs
+must run.  The accepted rule is to stalk one's enemy relentlessly and
+get him first.  King happened to be bunting, although not for human
+life, and he felt bold, but the men with him dreaded each upstanding
+crag, that might conceal a rifleman.  Armed men behind corners mean
+only one thing in the "Hills."
+
+The animals grew weary to the verge of dropping, for the "road"
+had been made for the most part by mountain freshets, and where
+that was not the case it was imaginary altogether.  They traveled
+upward, along ledges that were age-worn in the limestone--downward
+where the "hell-stones" slid from under them to almost bottomless
+ravines, and a false step would have been instant death--up again
+between big edged boulders, that nipped the mule's pack and let
+the mule between--past many and many a lonely cairn that hid the
+bones of a murdered man (buried to keep his ghost from making trouble)--
+ever with a tortured ridge of rock for sky-line and generally leaning
+against a wind, that chilled them to the bone, while the fierce sun
+burned them.
+
+At night and at noon they slept fitfully at the chance-met shrine
+of some holy man.  The "Hills" are full of them, marked by fluttering
+rags that can be seen for miles away;  and though the Quran's meaning
+must be stretched to find excuse, the Hillmen are adept at stretching
+things and hold those shrines as sacred as the Book itself.  Men who
+would almost rather cut throats than gamble regard them as sanctuaries.
+
+When a man says he is holy he can find few in the "Hills" to believe
+him;  but when he dies or is tortured to death or shot, even the men
+who murdered him will come and revere his grave.
+
+Whole villages leave their preciousest possessions at a shrine
+before wandering in search of summer pasture.  They find them safe
+on their return, although the "Hills" are the home of the lightest-
+fingered thieves on earth, who are prouder of villainy than of virtue.
+A man with a blood-feud, and his foe hard after him, may sleep in
+safety at a faquir's grave.  His foe will wait within range, but
+he will not draw trigger until the grave is left behind.
+
+So a man may rest in temporary peace even on the road to Khinjan,
+although Khinjan and peace have nothing whatever in common.
+
+It was at such a shrine, surrounded by tattered rags tied to sticks,
+that fluttered in the wind three or four thousand feet above Khyber
+level, that King drew Ismail into conversation, and deftly forced
+on him the role of questioner.
+
+"How can'st thou see the Caves!" he asked, for King had hinted at
+his intention;  and for answer King gave him a glimpse of the gold
+bracelet.
+
+"Aye!  Well and good!  But even she dare not disobey the rule.
+Khinjan was there before she came, and the rule was there from the
+beginning, when the first men found the Caves!  Some--hundreds--
+have gained admission, lacking the right.  But who ever saw them
+again?  Allah!  I, for one, would not chance it!"
+
+"Thou and I are two men!" answered King.  "Allah gave thee qualities
+I lack.  He gave thee the strength of a bull and a mountain goat
+in one, and her for a mistress.  To me he gave other qualities.  I
+shall see the Caves.  I am not afraid."
+
+"Aye!  He gave thee other gifts indeed!  But listen!  How many
+Indian servants of the British Raj have set out to see the Caves?
+Many, many--aye, very many!  Again and again the sirkar sent its
+loyal ones.  Did any return?  Not one!  Some were crucified before
+they reached the place.  One died slowly on the very rock whereon
+we sit, with his eyelids missing and his eyes turned to the sun!
+Some entered Khinjan, and the women of the place made sport with them.
+Those would rather have been crucified outside had they but known.
+Some, having got by Khinjan, entered the Caves.  None ever came out
+again!"
+"Then, what is my case to thee?" King asked him  "If I can not
+come out again and there is a secret then the secret will be kept,
+and what is the trouble?"
+
+"I love thee," the Afridi answered simply.  "Thou art a man after
+mine own heart.  Turn!  Go back before it is too late!"
+
+King shook his head.
+
+"Be warned!"
+
+Ismail reached out a hairy-backed hand that shook with half-
+suppressed emotion.
+
+"When we reach Khinjan, and I come within reach of her orders again,
+then I am her man, not thine!"
+
+King smiled, glancing again at the gold bracelet on his arm.
+
+"I look like her man, too!"
+
+"Thou!"  Ismail's scorn was well feigned if it was not real.  "Thou
+chicken running to the hand that will pluck thy breast-feathers!
+Listen!  Abdurrahman--he of Khabul--and may Allah give his ugly
+bones no peace!--Abdurrahman of Khabul sought the secret of the Caves.
+He sent his men to set an ambush.  They caught twenty coming out
+of Khinjan on a raid.  The twenty were carried to Khabul and put
+to torture there.  How many, think you, told the secret under torture?
+They died cursing Abdurrahman to his face and he died without the
+secret!  May God recompense him with the fire that burns forever
+and scalding water and ashes to eat!  May rats eat his bones!"
+
+"Had Abdurrahman this?" asked King, touching the bracelet.
+
+"Nay!  He would have given one eye for it, but none would trade
+with him!  He knew of it, but never saw it."
+ 
+"I am more favored.  I have it.  It is hers, is it not?"  Does not
+she know the secret?"
+
+"She knows all that any man knows and more!"
+
+"Was she seen to slay a man in the teeth of written law?" asked King,
+and Ismail stared so hard at him that he laughed.
+
+"I was in Khinjan once before, my friend!  I know the rule!  I
+failed to reach the Caves that other time because I had no witnesses
+to swear they had seen me slay a man in the teeth of written law.
+I know!"
+
+"Who saw thee this time?" Ismail asked, and began to cackle with
+the cruel humor of the "Hills," that sees amusement in a man's undoing,
+or in the destruction of his plans.  His humor forced him to explain.
+
+"The price of an entrance has come of late to be the life of an
+English arrficer!  Many an one the English have dubbed Ghazi,
+because he crossed the border and buried his knife in a man on
+church parade!  They hang and burn them, knowing our Muslim law,
+that denies Heaven to him who is hanged and burned.  Yet the man
+they miscall ghazi sought but the key to Khinjan Caves, with no
+thought at all about Heaven!  Thou art a British arrficer.  It may
+be they will let thee enter the Caves at her bidding.  It may be,
+too, that they will keep thee in a cage there for some chief's son
+to try his knife on when the time comes to win admission!  Listen--
+man o' my heart!--so strict is the rule that boys born in the Caves,
+when they come to manhood, must go and slay an Englishman and earn
+outlawry before they may come back;  and lest they prove fearful
+and betray the secret, ten men follow each.  They die by the hand
+of one or other of the ten unless they have slain their man within
+two weeks. So the secret has been kept more years than ten men can
+remember!" (That estimate was doubtless due to a respect for figures
+and bore no relation to the length of a human generation.)
+
+"Whom did she kill to gain admission?" King asked him unexpectedly.
+
+"Ask her!" said Ismail.  "It is her business."
+
+"And thou?  Was the life of a British officer the price paid?"
+
+"Nay.  I slew a mullah."
+
+The calmness of the admission, and the satisfaction that its memory
+seemed to bring the owner made King laugh.  He found lawless
+satisfaction for himself in that Ismail's blood-price should have
+been a priest, not one of his brother officers.  A man does not
+follow King's profession for health, profit or sentiment's sake,
+but healthy sentiment remains.  The loyalty that drives him, and
+is its own most great reward, makes him a man to the middle.  He
+liked Ismail.  He could not have liked him in the same way if he
+had known him guilty of English blood, which is only proof, of course,
+that sentiment and common justice are not one.  But sentiment remains.
+Justice is an ideal.
+
+"Be warned and go back!" urged Ismail.
+
+"Come with me, then."
+
+"Nay, I am her man.  She waits for me!"
+
+"I imagine she waits for me!" laughed King.  "Forward!  We have
+rested in this place long enough!"
+
+So on they went, climbing and descending the naked ramparts that
+lead eastward and upward and northward to the Roof of Mother Earth--
+Ismail ever grumbling into his long beard, and King consumed by a
+fiercer enthusiasm than ever had yet burned in him,
+
+"Forward!  Forward!  Cast hounds forward!  Forward in any event!"
+says Cocker.  It is only regular generals in command of troops in
+the field who must keep their rear open for retreat.  The Secret
+Service thinks only of the goal ahead.
+
+It was ten of a blazing forenoon, and the sun had heated up the
+rocks until it was pain to walk on them and agony to sit, when they
+topped the last escarpment and came in sight of Khinjan's walls,
+across a mile-wide rock ravine--Khinjan the unregenerate, that has
+no other human habitation within a march because none dare build.
+
+They stood on a ridge and leaned against the wind.  Beneath them
+a path like a rope ladder descended in zigzags to the valley that
+is Khinjan's dry moat;  it needed courage as well as imagination
+to believe that the animals could be guided down it.
+
+"Is there no other way?" asked King.  He knew well of one other,
+but one does not tell all one knows in the "Hills," and there might
+have been a third way.
+
+"None from this side," said Ismail.
+
+"And on the other side?"
+
+"There is a rather better path--that by which the sirkar's troops
+once came--although it has been greatly obstructed since.  It is
+two days' march from here to reach it.  Be warned a last time,
+sahib--little hakim--be warned and go back!"
+
+"Thou bird of ill omen!" laughed King.  "Must thou croak from every
+rock we rest on?"
+
+"If I were a bird I would fly away back with thee!" said Ismail.
+
+"Forward, since we can not fly--forward and downward!" King answered. 
+"She must have crossed this valley.  Therefore there are things
+worth while beyond!  Forward!"
+
+The animals, weary to death anyhow, fell rather that walked down
+the track.  The men sat and scrambled.  And the heat rose up to
+meet them from the waterless ravine as if its floor were Tophet's
+lid and the devil busy under it, stoking.
+
+It was midday when at last they stood on bottom and swayed like
+men in a dream fingering their bruises and scarcely able for the
+heat haze to see the tangled mass of stone towers and mud-and-stone
+walls that faced them, a mile away.  Nobody challenged them yet.
+Khinjan itself seemed dead, crackled in the heat.
+
+"Sahib, let us mount the hill again and wait for night and a cool
+breeze!" urged Darya Khan.
+
+Ismail clucked into his beard and spat to wet his lips.
+
+"This glare makes my eyes ache!" he grumbled.
+
+"Wait, sahib!  Wait a while!" urged the others.
+
+"Forward!" ordered King.  "This must be Tophet.  Know ye not that
+none come out of Tophet by the way they entered in?  Forward!  The
+exit is beyond!"
+
+They staggered after him, sheltering their eyes and faces from the
+glare with turban-ends and odds and ends of clothing.  The animals
+swayed behind them with hung heads and drooping ears, and neither
+man nor beast had sense enough left to have detected an ambush.  They
+were more than half-way across the valley, hunting for shadow where
+none was to be found, when a shotted salute brought them up all-
+standing in a cluster.  Six or eight nickel-coated bullets spattered
+on the rocks close by, and one so narrowly missed King that be could
+feel its wind.
+
+Up went all their hands together, and they held them so until they
+ached.  Nothing whatever happened.  Their arms ceased aching and
+grew numb.
+ 
+"Forward!" ordered King.
+
+After another quarter of a mile of stumbling among hot boulders,
+not one of which was big enough to afford cover, or shelter from
+the sun, another volley whistled over them.  Their hands went up
+again, and this time King could see turbaned heads above a parapet
+in front.  But nothing further happened.
+
+"Forward!" he ordered.
+
+They advanced another two hundred yards and a third volley rattled
+among the rocks on either hand, frightening one of the mules so
+that it stumbled and fell and had to be helped up again.  When that
+was done, and the mule stood trembling, they all faced the wall.
+But they were too weary to hold their hands up any more.  Thirst
+had begun to exercise its sway.  One of the men was half delirious.
+
+"Who are ye?" howled a human being, whose voice was so like a wolf's
+that the words at first had no meaning.  He peered over the parapet,
+a hundred feet above, with his head so swathed in dirty linen that
+he looked like a bandaged corpse.
+
+"What will ye?  Who comes uninvited into Khinjan?"
+
+King bethought him of Yasmini's talisman.  He, held it up, and the
+gold band glinted in the sun.  Yet, although a Hillman's eyes are
+keener than an eagle's, he did not believe the thing could be
+recognized at that angle, and from that distance.  Another thought
+suggested itself to him.  He turned his head and caught Ismail in
+the act of signaling with both hands.
+
+"Ye may come!" howled the watchman on the parapet, disappearing instantly.
+
+King trembled--perhaps as a racehorse trembles at the starting gate,
+though he was weary enough to tremble from fatigue.  The "Hills," that
+numb the hearts of many men, had not cowed him, for he loved them and
+in love there is no fear.  Heat and cold an hunger were all in the
+day's work;  thirst was an incident;  and the whistle of lead in
+the wind had never meant more to him than work ahead to do.
+
+But a greyhound trembles in the leash.  A boiler, trembles when
+word goes down the speaking-tube from the bridge for "all she's got."
+And so the mild-looking hakim Kurram Khan, walking gingerly across
+her rocks, donning cheap, imitation shell-rimmed spectacles to help
+him look the part, trembled even more than the leg-weary horse he led.
+
+But that passed.  He was all in hand when he led his men up over
+a rough stone causeway to a door in the bottom of a high battlemented
+wall and waited for somebody to open it.
+
+The great teak door looked as if it had been stolen from some Hindu
+temple, and he wondered how and when they could have brought it
+there across those savage intervening miles.  With its six-inch
+teak planks and bronze bolts its weight must be guessed at in tons--
+yet a horse can hardly carry a man along any of the trails that lead
+to Khinjan!
+
+The wood bore the marks of siege and fracture repair.  The walls
+were new-built, of age-old stone. The last expedition out of India
+had leveled every bit of those defenses flat with the valley, but
+Khinjan's devils had reerected them, as ants rebuild a rifled nest.
+
+The door was swung open after a time, pulled by a rope, manipulated
+from above by unseen hands.  Inside was another blind wall, twenty
+feet behind the first.  To the right a low barricade blocked the
+passage and provided a safe vantage point from which it could be
+swept by a hail of lead; but to the left a path ran unobstructed
+for more than a hundred yards between the walls, to where the way
+was blocked by another teak door, set in unscalable black rock.
+High above the door was a ledge of rock that crossed like a bridge
+from wall to wall, with a parapet of stone built upon it, pierced
+for rifle-fire.
+
+As they approached this second door a Rangar turban, not unlike
+King's own, appeared above the parapet on the ledge and a voice
+he recognized hailed him good-humoredly.
+
+"Salaam aleikoum!"
+
+"And upon thee be peace!" King answered in the Pashtu tongue, for
+the "Hills" are polite, whatever the other principles.
+
+Rewa Gunga's face beamed down on him, wreathed in smiles that seemed
+to include mockery as well as triumph.  Looking up at him at an
+angle that made his neck ache and dazzled his eyes, King could not
+be sure, but it seemed to him that the smile said, "Here you are,
+my man, and aren't you in for it?"  He more than half suspected
+he was intended to understand that.  But the Rangar's conversation
+took another line.
+
+"By jove!" he chuckled.  "She expected you.  She guessed you are
+a hound who can hunt well on a dry scent, and she dared bet you
+will come in spite of all odds!  But she didn't expect you in Rangar
+dress!  No, by jove!  You jolly well will take the wind out of
+her sails!"
+
+King made no answer. For one thing, the word "hound," even in English,
+is not essentially a compliment.  But he had a better reason than that.
+
+"Did you find the way easily?" the Rangar asked but King kept silence.
+
+"Is he parched?  Have they cut his tongue out on the road?"
+
+That question was in Pashtu, directed at Ismail and the others,
+but King answered it.
+
+"Oh, as for that," he said, salaaming again in the fastidious manner
+of a native gentleman, "I know no other tongue than Pashtu and my
+own Rajasthani.  My name is Kurram Khan.  I ask admittance."
+
+He held up his wrist to show the gold bracelet, and high over his
+head the Rangar laughed like a bell.
+
+"Shabash!" he laughed.  "Well done!  Enter, Kurram Khan, and be
+welcome, thou and thy men.  Be welcome in her name!"
+
+Somebody pulled a rope and the door yawned wide, giving on a kind
+of courtyard whose high walls allowed no view of anything but hot
+blue sky.  King hurried under the arch and looked up, but on the
+courtyard side of the door the wall rose sheer and blank, and there
+was no sign of window or stairs, or of any means of reaching the
+ledge from which the Rangar had addressed him.  What he did see,
+as he faced that way, was that each of his men salaamed low and
+covered his face with both hands as he entered.
+
+"Whom do ye salute?" he asked.
+
+Ismail stared back at him almost insolently, as one who would rebuke
+a fool.
+
+"Is this not her nest these days?" he answered.  "It is well to
+bow low.  She is not as other women.  She is she!  See yonder!"
+
+Through a gap under an arch in a far corner of the courtyard came
+a one-eyed, lean-looking villain in Afridi dress who leaned on a
+long gun and stared at them under his hand.  After a leisurely
+consideration of them he rubbed his nose slowly with one finger,
+spat contemptuously, and then used the finger to beckon them,
+crooking it queerly and turning on his heel.  He did not say one word.
+
+King led the way after him on foot, for even in the "Hills" where
+cruelty is a virtue, a man may be excused, on economic grounds,
+for showing mercy to his beast.  His men tugged the weary animals
+along behind him, through the gap under the arch and along an almost
+interminable, smelly maze of alleys whose sides were the walls of
+square stone towers, or sometimes of mud-and-stone-walled compounds,
+and here and there of sheer, slab-sided cliff.
+
+At intervals they came to bolted narrow doors, that probably led
+up to overhead defenses.  Not fifty yards of any alley was straight;
+not a yard but what was commanded from overhead.  Khinjan bad been
+rebuilt since its last destruction by some expert who knew all about
+street fighting.  Like Old Jerusalem, the place could have contained
+a civil war of a hundred factions, and still have opposed stout
+resistance to an outside army.
+
+Alley gave on to courtyard, and filthy square to alley, until
+unexpectedly at last a seemingly blind passage turned sharply and
+opened on a straight street, of fair width, and more than half a
+mile long.  It is marked "Street of the Dwellings" on the secret
+army maps, and it has been burned so often by Khinjan rioters, as
+well as by expeditions out of India, that a man who goes on a long
+journey never expects to find it the same on his return.
+
+It was lined on either hand with motley dwellings, out of which a
+motlier crowd of people swarmed to stare at King and his men.  There
+were houses built of stolen corrugated iron-that cursed, hot, hideous
+stuff that the West has inflicted on an all-too-willing East;  others
+of wood--of stone--of mud--of mat of skins--even of tent-cloth.
+Most of them were filthy.  A row of kites sat on the roof of one,
+and in the gutter near it three gorged vultures sat on the remains
+of a mule.  Scarcely a house was fit to be defended, for Khinjan's
+fighting men all possess towers, that are plastered about the
+overfrowning mountain like wasp nests on a wall.  These were the
+sweepers, the traders, the loose women, the mere penniless and the
+more or less useful men--not Khinjan's inner guard by any means.
+
+There were Hindus--sycophants, keepers of accounts and writers to
+the chiefs (since literacy is at premium in these parts).  In proof
+of Khinjan's catholic taste and indiscriminate villainy, there were
+women of nearly every Indian breed and caste, many of them stolen
+into shameful slavery, but some of them there from choice.  And
+there were little children--little naked brats with round drum tummies,
+who squealed and shrilled and stared with bold eyes;  some of them
+were pretending to be bandits on their own account already, and
+one flung a stone that missed King by an inch.  The stone fell in
+the gutter on the far side and, started a fight among the mangy
+street curs, which proved a diversion and probably saved King's
+party from more accurate attentions.
+
+Perhaps a thousand souls came out to watch, all told.  Not an eye
+of them all missed the government marks on King's trappings, or the
+government brand on the mules, and after a minute or two, when the
+procession was half-way down the street, a man reproved the child
+who had thrown a stone, and he was backed up by the others.  They
+classified King correctly, exactly as he meant they should.  As a
+hakim--a man of medicine--he could fill a long-felt want;  but by
+the brand on his accouterments he walked an openly avowed robber,
+and that made him a brother in crime.  Somebody cuffed the next
+child who picked up a stone.
+
+He knew the street of old, although it had changed perhaps a dozen
+times since he had seen it.  It was a cul-de-sac, and at the end
+of it, just as on his previous visit, there stood a stone mosque,
+whose roof leaned back at a steep angle against the mountain-side.
+The fact that it was a mosque, and that it was the only building
+used as such in Khinjan, had saved it from being leveled to the
+ground by the last British expedition.
+
+It was a famous mosque in its way, for the bed-sheet of the Prophet
+is known to hang in it, preserved against the ravages of time and
+the touch of infidels by priceless Afghan rugs before and behind,
+so that it hangs like a great thin sandwich before the rear stone
+wall.  King had seen it.  Very vividly he recalled his almost
+exposure by a suspicious mullah, when be had crept nearer to
+examine it at close range.  For the Secret Service must probe
+all things.
+
+There had been an attempt since his last visit to make the mosque's
+exterior look more in keeping with the building's use.  It was cleaner.
+It had been smeared with whitewash.  A platform had been built on
+the roof for the muezzin.  But it still looked more like a fort
+than a place of worship.
+
+Toward it the one-eyed ruffian led the way, with the long, leisurely-
+seeming gait of a mountaineer.  At the door, in the middle of the
+end of the street, he paused and struck on the lintel three times
+with his gun-butt.  And that was a strange proceeding, to say the
+least, in a land where the mosque is public resting place for homeless
+ones, and all the "faithful" have a right to enter.
+
+A mullah, shaven like a mummy for some unaccountable reason--even
+his eyebrows and eyelashes had been removed--pushed his bare head
+through the door and blinked at them.  There was some whispering
+and more staring, and at last the mullah turned his back.
+
+The door slammed.  The one-eyed guide grounded his gun-butt on the
+stone, and the procession waited, watched by the crowd that had
+lost its interest sufficiently to talk and joke.
+
+In two minutes the mullah returned and threw a mat over the threshold.
+It turned out to be the end of a long narrow strip that he kicked
+and unrolled in front of him all across the floor of the mosque.
+After that it was not so astonishing that the horses and mules were
+allowed to enter.
+
+"Which proves I was right after all!" murmured King to himself.
+
+In a steel box at Simla is a memorandum, made after his former
+visit to the place, to the effect that the entrance into Khinjan
+Caves might possibly be inside the mosque.  Nobody had believed it
+likely, and he had not more than half favored it himself;  but it
+is good, even when the next step may lead into a death-trap, to
+see one's first opinions confirmed.
+
+He nodded to himself as the outer door slammed shut behind them,
+for that was another most unusual circumstance.
+
+A faint light shone through slit-like windows, changing darkness
+into gloom, and little more than vaguely hinting at the Prophet's
+bed-sheet.  But for a section of white wall to either side of it,
+the relic might have seemed part of the shadows.  The mullah stood
+with his back to it and beckoned King nearer.  He approached until
+he could see the pattern on the covering rugs, and the pink rims
+round the mullah's lashless eyes.
+
+"What is thy desire?" the mullah asked--as a wolf might ask what
+a lamb wants.
+
+Supposing Yasmini to be jealous of invasion of her realm, King did
+not doubt she would be glad to have him break down at this point.
+Until be had actually gained access to her, nobody could reasonably
+charge her with his safety.  If he had been done to death in the
+Khyber, the sirkar would have known it in a matter of hours.  If
+he were killed here they might never know it.
+
+"Answer!" said the mullah.  "What is thy desire?"
+
+"Audience with her!" he answered, and showed the gold bracelet on
+his wrist.
+
+The red eye-rims of the mullah blinked a time or two, and though
+he did not salute the bracelet, as others had invariably done, his
+manner underwent a perceptible change.
+
+"That is proof that she knows thee.  What is thy name."
+
+"Kurram Khan."
+
+"And thy business?"
+
+"Hakim."
+
+"We need thee in Khinjan Caves!  But none enter who have not earned
+right to enter!  There is but one key.  Name it!"
+
+King drew in his breath.  He had hoped Yasmini's talisman would
+prove to be key enough.  The nails his left hand nearly pierced
+the palm, but he smiled pleasantly.
+
+"He who would enter must slay a man before witnesses in the teeth
+of written law!" he said.
+
+"And thou?"
+
+"I slew an Englishman!"  The boast made his blood run cold, but
+his expression was one of sinful pride.
+
+"Whom?  When?  Where?"
+
+"Athelstan King--a British arrficer--sent on his way to these 'Hills'
+to spy!"
+
+It was like having spells cast on himself to order!
+
+"Where is his body?"
+
+"Ask the vultures!  Ask the kites!"
+
+"And thy witnesses?"
+
+Hoping against hope, King turned and waved his hand.  As he did so,
+being quick-eyed, he saw Ismail drive an elbow home into Darya Khan's
+ribs, an caught a quick interchange of whispers.
+
+"These men are all known to me," said the mullah.  "They all have
+right to enter here.  They have right to testify.  Did ye see him
+slay his man?"
+
+"Aye!" lied Ismail, prompt as friend can be.
+
+"Aye!" lied Darya Khan, fearful of Ismail's elbow.
+
+"Then, enter!" said the priest resignedly, as one admits a communicant
+against his better judgment.
+
+He turned his back on them so as to face the Prophet's bed-sheet
+and the rear wall, and in that minute a hairy hand gripped King's
+arm from behind, and Ismail's voice hissed hot-breathed in his ear.
+
+"Ready of tongue!  Ready of wit!  Who told thee I would lie to save
+thy skin?  Be thy kismet as thy courage, then--but I am hers, not
+thy man!  Hers, thou light of life--though God knows I love thee!"
+
+The mullah seized the Prophet's bed-sheet and its covering rugs in
+both hands, with about as much reverence as salesmen show for what
+they keep in stock.  The whole lot slid to one side by means of
+noisy rings on a rod, and a wall lay bare, built of crudely cut
+but very well laid stone blocks.  It appeared to reach unbroken
+across the whole width of the mosque's interior.
+
+On the floor lay a mallet, a peculiar thing of bronze, cast in one
+piece, handle and all.  The mullah took it in his band and struck
+the stone floor sharply once--then twice again--then three times--
+then a dozen times in quick succession.  The floor rang hollow at
+that spot.
+
+After about a minute there came one answering hammer-stroke from
+beyond the wall.  Then the mullah laid the mallet down and though
+King ached to pick it up and examine it he did not dare.
+
+Excitement now was probably the least of his emotions.  It had been
+swallowed in interest.  But in his guise of hakim he had to beware
+of that superficial western carelessness, that permits folk to
+acknowledge themselves frightened or excited or amused.  His business
+was to attract as little attention to himself as possible;  and to
+that end he folded his hands and looked reverent, as if entering
+some Mecca of his dreams.  Through his horn-rimmed spectacles his
+eyes looked far-away and dreamy.  But it would have been a mistake
+to suppose that a detail was escaping him.
+
+The irregular lines in the masonry began to be more pronounced.
+All at once the wall shook and they gaped by an inch or two, as
+happens when an earthquake has shaken buildings without bringing
+anything down.  Then an irregular section of wall began to move
+quite smoothly away in front of him, leaving a gap through which
+eight men abreast could have marched.
+
+As it receded be observed that the lowest course stones was laid
+on a bronze foundation, that keyed in wide bronze grooves.  There
+was oil enough in the grooves to have greased a ship's ways and
+there neither squeak nor tremor as the tons of masonry slid back.
+
+At the end of perhaps three minutes that section of the wall had
+become the fourth side of a twenty-foot-wide island that stood
+fair in the middle of a tunnel, splitting it in two to right and left.
+Judging by the angle of the two divisions they became one again
+before going very far.
+
+The mullah stood aside and motioned King to enter.  But the one-eyed
+guide who had led them to the mosque thrust himself between Darya
+Khan and Ismail, pushed King aside and took the lead.
+
+"Nay!" he said, "I am responsible to her."
+
+It was the first time he had spoken and be appeared to resent the
+waste of words.
+
+The tunnel that led to the left was pierced in twenty places in
+the roof for rifle-fire;  a score of men with enough ammunition
+could have held it forever against an army.  But the right-hand
+way looked undefended.  Nevertheless, the guide led to the left,
+and King followed him, filled with curiosity.
+
+"Many have entered!" sang the lashless mullah in a sing-song chant.
+"More have sought to enter!  Some who remained without were wisest!
+I count them!  I keep count!  Many went in!  Not all came out again
+by this road!"
+ 
+"Then there is another road?" King wondered, but he held his tongue
+and followed the guide.
+
+It proved to be fifty yards through part natural, part hand-hewn,
+tunnel to the neck of the fork where the left--and right-hand passages
+became one again.  He stopped at the fork and looked back, for none
+of his men was following.
+
+He caught the sound of scuffling of clattering hoofs, and grunts
+and shouted oaths--and started to run back, since even a native
+hakim may protect his own, should he care to, even in the "Hills."
+
+For the sake of principle he chose the other passage, for Cocker says,
+"Look! Look! Look!"  But the guide seized him by the arm from behind
+and swung him back again.
+
+"Not that way!" he growled.  But he offered no explanation.
+
+In the "Hills" it is not good to ask "why" of strangers.  It is
+good to he glad one was not knifed, and to be deferent until more
+suitable occasion.  King started to run again, but this time along
+the same defended passage down which they had come.  And now the
+guide made no objection but leaned on his long gun and waited.
+
+The charger proved to be making the trouble--the horse that King
+had exchanged with the jezailchi in the Khyber.  The terrified brute
+was refusing to enter the passage, and all the men, including Ismail
+and the mullah, were shoving, or else tugging at the reins.
+
+At the moment King appeared the united strength of six men was
+beginning to prevail.  The mullah let go the reins, and in that
+instant the horse saw King advance toward him out of the tunnel;
+so, after the manner of horses, he chose the other passage.  King
+ran at full speed round the corner after him, remembering that the
+guide had admitted responsibility, and therefore that the chances
+were he would be rescued should he run into a trap.
+
+Suddenly, ten yards in the lead down the dark tunnel the horse threw
+his weight back with a clatter of sparks and screamed as only a
+horse can.  After that there was neither sight nor sound of him.
+
+Creeping forward with both arms outstretched against the left-hand
+wall, he reached the spot where, the horse had been, and shuddered
+on the smooth dark edge of a hole that went the full width of the
+floor.  There came whispering up out of it, and a dank wet smell,
+as if there were running water a mile away below.  He could feel
+that a little air flowed downward into it.  Twenty yards away on
+the far side the path resumed, but there was neither hand nor foothold
+on the smooth damp walls between.  He went back to his men with a
+shiver between his shoulder-blades, and the mullah, standing in the
+gap of the mosque wall, blinked at him with lashless eyes.
+
+"Many have entered," be chanted maliciously.  "Some went out by a
+different road!"
+
+"Come!" Ismail growled at the other men, seizing the mule's bridle
+himself and leading to the left.  "The ghosts will have a charger
+now for their captain to ride!  Lead on, Hakim sahib!"
+
+"Come!" called the one-eyed guide from the neck of the fork ahead.
+And as they all pressed forward after King the hairless mullah gave
+a signal and the great stone door slid slowly into place.  It was
+like a tombstone.  It was as if the world that mortals know were
+a thing of the forgotten past and the underworld lay ahead.
+ 
+"Lead along, Charon!" King grinned.  He needed some sort of pleasantry
+to steady his nerves.  But even so he wondered what the nerves of
+India would be like if her millions knew of this place.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+
+
+
+Oh, Abdul trod with a martial tread,
+Swinging his scimiter's weight.
+"I am overlord here," he said,
+"And he who wishes may chance his head,
+"For my blade is long, and my arm is strong,
+"And the goods of the world to the bold belong!"
+So Abdul guarded the gate.
+
+Many a head did Abdul cleave,
+Turban and crown and chin,
+For all the 'venturers sought to know
+What it could be he guarded so.
+And since none give but eke receive,
+A thrust in his ribs made Abdul grieve
+For good blood outpourin'.
+
+His men wept, watching Abdul bleed
+And life's light waning dim,
+Till he cursed them. "Open the fort gate wide!
+To saddle, and scour the countryside
+For a leech!" he swore.  "God rot ye, ride!"
+'Twas thus, in the guise of a friend in need,
+His enemy came to him.
+
+
+The second gap closed up behind them and the tunnel began to echo
+weirdly.  The mule was the next to be panic-stricken.  The noise
+of his plunging increased the echoes a thousand times and multiplied
+his fright, until the poor brute collapsed into meek obedience at last.
+But the guide strode on unconcerned with his easy Hillman gait,
+neither deigning to glance back nor making any verbal comment.
+
+Over their heads, at irregular intervals, there were holes that
+if they led as King presumed into caves above, left not an inch
+of all the long passage that could not have been swept by rifle-fire.
+It was impregnable;  for no artillery heavy enough to pound the
+mountain into pieces could ever be dragged within range.  Whatever
+hiding place this entrance guarded could be held forever, given
+food and cartridges!
+
+The tunnel wound to right and left like a snake, growing lighter
+and lighter after each bend;  and soon their own din began to be
+swallowed in a greater one that entered from the farther end.  After
+two sharp turns they came out unexpectedly into the blaze of blue day,
+nearly stunned by light and sound.  A road came up from below like
+that of an ocean in the grip of a typhoon.
+
+When his wits recovered from the shock, King struggled with a wild
+desire to yell, for before him, was what no servant of British India
+had ever seen and lived to tell about, and that is an experience
+more potent than unbroken rum.
+
+They had emerged from a round-mouthed tunnel--it looked already
+like a rabbit-hole, so huge was the cliff behind--on to a ledge
+of rock that formed a sort of road along one side of a mile-wide
+chasm.  Above him, it seemed a mile up, was blue sky, to which
+limestone walls ran sheer, with scarcely a foothold that could be
+seen. Beneath, so deep that eyes could not guess how deep, yawned
+the stained gorge of the underworld, many-colored, smooth and wet.
+
+And out of a great, jagged slit in the side of the cliff, perhaps
+a thousand feet below them, there poured down into thunderous dimness
+a waterfall whose breadth seemed not less than half a mile.  It
+spouted seventy or eighty yards before it began to curve, and its
+din was like the voice of all creation.
+
+Ismail came and stood by King in silence, taking his hand, as a
+little child might.  Presently he stooped and picked up a stone
+and tossed it over.
+
+"Gone!" he said simply.  "That down there is Earth's Drink!"
+
+"And this is the 'Heart of the Hills' men boast about?"
+
+"Nay!  It is not!" snapped Ismail.
+
+"Then, where--"
+
+But the one-eyed guide beckoned impatiently, and King led the way
+after him, staring as hakim or prisoner or any man had right to do
+on first admission to such wonders.  Not to have stared would have
+been to proclaim himself an idiot.
+
+The least of all the wonders was that the secret of the place should
+have been kept all down the centuries;  for it was the hollow middle
+of a limestone mountain, that could neither be looked down into from
+above, because the heights were not scalable, nor guessed at from
+the conformation of the country.  The river, that flowed out of
+rock and went plunging down into the chasm, must be snow from the
+Himalayan peaks, on its way to swell the sea.  There was no other
+way to account for that;  but that explanation did explain why at
+least one Indian river is no greater than it is.
+
+The road they followed was a fold in the natural rock, rising and
+falling and curving like a ribbon, but tending on the average downward.
+It looked to be about two miles to the point where it curved at the
+chasm's end and swept round and downward, to be lost in a fissure
+in the cliff.
+
+They soon began to pass the mouths of caves.  Some were above the road,
+now and then at crazy heights above it, reached by artificial steps
+hewn out of the stone.  Others were below, reached from the road by
+means of ladders, that trembled and swayed over the dizzying waterfall.
+Most of the caves were inhabited, for armed men and sullen women
+came to their entrances to stare.
+
+Ears grow accustomed to the sound of water sooner than to almost
+anything.  It was not long before King's ears could catch the patter
+of his men's feet following, and the shod clink of the mule.  He
+could hear when Ismail whispered:
+
+"Be brave, little hakim!  She loves fearless men."
+
+As the track descended caves became more numerous.  In one there
+were horses, for as they passed there came a whiff of unclean stables,
+and the litter of fodder and dung was all about the entrance.  The
+mouths of other caves were sealed, with great wax disks, strangely
+stamped, affixed to stout wooden doors.  One cave smelt as if oil
+were stored in it, and King wondered whence the oil was brought--
+for the sirkar knows to a pint and an ounce what products travel
+up and down the Khyber.
+
+At last the guide halted, in the middle of a short steep slope
+where the path was less than six feet wide and a narrow cave mouth
+gave directly on to it.
+
+"Be content to rest here!" he said, pointing.
+
+"Thy cave?" asked King.
+
+"Nay. God's!  I am the caretaker!"
+
+(The "Hills" are very pious and polite, between the acts of robbing
+and shedding blood.)
+
+"Allah, then, reward thee, brother!" answered King.  "Allah give
+sight to thy blind eye!  Allah give thee children!  Allah give thee
+peace, aud to all thy house!"
+
+The guide salaamed, half-mockingly, half-wondering at such eloquence,
+pausing in the passage to point into the side-caves that debouched
+to either hand.  There was a niche of a place, where a man might
+lie on guard near the entrance;  another cave in which horses could
+be stabled, with plenty of fodder piled up ready;  another beyond
+that for servants and baggage, with a fireplace and cooking pots;
+and at the last at the rear of all a great cavern full of eerie gloom,
+that opened out from the end of the passage like a bottle at the
+end of a long neck.
+
+Peering about him into vastness, King became aware of frame beds,
+placed at intervals in a row, each with a mat beside it.  And there
+were several brass basins and ewers for water.  Also there were
+some little bronze lamps;  the guide lit three of them, and King
+took up one to examine it.  As he did so, involuntarily his hand
+almost went to his bosom, where the strange knife still reposed
+that he had taken from the would-be murderer in the train to Delhi.
+
+There was no gold on the lamp;  but the handle by which he lifted
+it had been cast, the devils of the Himalayas only knew how many
+centuries ago, in the form of a woman dancing;  her size, and her
+shape, and the art with which she had been fashioned, were the same
+as the handle of the knife.
+
+Watching him as a wolf eyes another one, the strange guide found
+his tongue.
+
+"How many such hast thou ever seen?" he asked.
+
+"None!" answered King, and the guide cackled at him, like a hen
+that has laid an egg.
+
+"There be many strange things in Khinjan, but few strangers!" he
+remarked;  and then, as if that were enough for any man to say on
+any occasion, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the cavern.
+It was the last King ever saw of him.  He followed him down the
+passage to the entrance and watched him until his back disappeared
+round the first bend, but the man never turned his head once.  He
+did not even look over the edge of the road, down into the amazing
+waterfall, nor up to the round disk of sky.
+
+King turned back and looked into the other caves--saw the weary
+horse and mule fed, watered and bedded down--took note of the running
+water that rushed out of a rock fissure and gurgled out of sight
+down another one--examined the servants' cave and saw that they had
+been amply provided with blankets.  There was nothing lacking that
+the most exacting traveler could have demanded at such a distance
+from civilization.  There was more than the most exacting would
+have dared expect.
+
+"Why isn't it damp in here?" he wondered, returning to his own cave.
+And then he noticed long fissures in the cavern walls, and that
+the smoke from the lamps drifted toward them.  He could not guess
+what made it do that, unless it were the suction of the enormous
+river hurrying underground;  and then he remembered that at the
+entrance air had rushed downward into the hole down which the horse
+had disappeared, which partly confirmed his guess.
+
+"Ismail!" he shouted, and jumped at the revolver-crack -like echo
+of his voice.
+
+Ismail came running.
+
+"Make the men carry the mule's packs into this cave.  You and Darya
+Khan stay here and help me open them.  Remember, ye are both assistants
+of Kurram Khan, the hakim!"
+
+"They will laugh at us!  They will laugh at us!" clucked Ismail,
+but he hurried to obey, while King wondered who would laugh.
+
+Within an hour a delegation came from no less a person than Yasmini
+herself, bearing her compliments, and hot food savory enough to
+make a brass idol's mouth water.  By that time King had his sets
+of surgical instruments and drugs and bandages all laid out on one
+of the beds and covered from view by a blanket.
+
+It was only one more proof of the British army's everlasting luck
+that one of the men, who set the great brass dish of food on the
+floor near King, had a swollen cheek, and that he should touch the
+swelling clumsily, as he lifted his hand to shake back a lock of
+greasy hair.
+
+There followed an oath like flint struck on steel ten times in
+rapid succession.
+
+"Does it pain thee, brother?" asked Kurram Khan the hakim.
+
+"Are there devils in Tophet!  Fire and my veins are one!"
+
+The man did not notice the eagerness beaming out of King's horn-
+rimmed spectacles, but Ismail did;  it seemed to him time to prove
+his virtues as assistant.
+
+"This is the famous hakim Kurram Khan," he boasted.  "He can cure
+anything, and for a very little fee!"
+
+"Nay, for no fee at all in this case!" said King.
+
+The man looked incredulous, but King drew the covering from his
+row of instruments and bottles.
+
+"Take a chance!" he advised.  "None but the brave wins anything!"
+
+The man sat down, as if he would argue the point at length, but
+Ismail and Darya Khan were new to the business and enthusiastic.
+They had him down, held tight on the floor to the huge amusement
+of the rest, before the man could even protest;  and his howls of
+rage did him no good, for Ismail drove the hilt of a knife between
+his open jaws to keep them open.
+
+A very large proportion of King's stores consisted of morphia and
+cocaine.  He injected enough cocaine to deaden the man's nerves,
+and allowed it time to work.  Then he drew out three back teeth in
+quick succession, to make sure he had the right one.
+
+Ismail let the victim up, and Darya Khan gave him water in a brass cup.
+Utterly without pain for the first time for days, the man was as
+grateful as a wolf freed from a trap.
+
+"Allah reward thee, since the service was free!" he smirked.
+
+"Are there any others in pain in Khinjan?" King asked him.
+
+"Listen to him!  What is Khinjan?  Is there one man without a wound
+or a sore or a scar or a sickness?"
+
+"Then, tell them," said King.
+
+The man laughed.
+
+"When I show my jaw, there will be a fight to be first!  Make ready,
+hakim!  I go!"
+
+He was true to his word and left the cave like a gust of wind,
+followed by the three who had come with him.  King sat down to eat,
+but he had not finished his meal--he had made the last little heap
+of rice into a ball with his fingers, native style, and was mopping
+up the last of the curried gravy with it--when the advance guard
+of the lame and the halt and the sick made its appearance.  The
+cave's entrance became jammed with them, and no riot ever made
+more noise.
+
+"Hakim! Ho, hakim! Where is the hakim who draws teeth? Where is
+the man who knows yunani?"
+
+Ten men burst down the passage all together, all clamoring, and
+one man wasted no time at all but began to tear away bloody bandages
+to show his wound.  The hardest thing now was to get and keep some
+kind of order, and for ten minutes Ismail and Darya Khan labored,
+using threats where argument failed, and brute force when they dared.
+It was like beating mad hounds from off their worry.  What established
+order at last was that King rolled up his sleeves and began, so
+that eagerness gave place to wonder.
+ 
+The "Hills" are not squeamish in any one particular;  so that the
+fact that the cave became a shambles upset nobody.  The surgeon's
+thrill that makes even half-amateurs oblivious of all but the work
+in hand, coupled with the desperate need of winning this first trick,
+made King horror-proof;  and nobody waiting for the next turn was
+troubled because the man under the knife screamed a little or bled
+more than usual.
+
+When they died--and more than one did die--men carried them out
+and flung them over the precipice into the waterfall below.
+
+Ismail and Darya Khan became choosers of the victims.  They seized
+a man, laid him on the bed, tore off his disgusting bandages and
+held their breath until the awful resulting stench had more or less
+dispersed.  Then King would probe or lance or bandage as he saw fit,
+using anaesthetics when he must, but managing mostly without them.
+
+They almost flung money at him.  Few of them asked what his fee
+would be.  Those who had no money brought him shawls, and swords,
+and even clothing.  Two or three brought old-fashioned fire-arms;
+but they were men who did not expect to live.  And King accepted
+every gift without comment, because that was in keeping with the
+part be played.  He tossed money and clothes and every other thing
+they gave him into a corner at the back of the cave, and nobody
+tried to steal them back, although a man suspected of honesty in
+that company would have been tortured to death as an heretic and
+would have had no sympathy.
+
+For hour after gruesome hour he toiled over wounds and sores such
+as only battles and evil living can produce, until men began to
+come at last with fresh wounds, all caused by bullets, wrapped in
+bandages on which the blood had caked but had not grown foul.
+
+"There has been fighting in the Khyber," somebody, informed him,
+and he stopped with lancet in mid-air to listen, scanning a hundred
+faces swiftly in the smoky lamplight.  There were ten men who held
+lamps for him, one of them a newcomer, and it was he who spoke.
+
+"Fighting in the Khyber!  Aye!  We were a little lashkar, but we
+drove them back into their fort!  Aye! we slew many!"
+
+"Not a jihad yet?" King asked, as if the world might be coming to an
+end.  The words were startled out of him.  Under other circumstances
+he would never have asked that question so directly;  but he had
+lost reckoning of everything but these poor devils' dreadful need
+of doctoring, and he was like a man roused out of a dream.  If a
+holy war had been proclaimed already, then he was engaged on a
+forlorn hope.  But the man laughed at him.
+
+"Nay, not yet.  Bull-with-a-beard holds back yet.  This was a little
+fight.  The jihad shall come later!"
+
+"And who is 'Bull-with-a-beard'?" King wondered;  but he did not
+ask that question because his wits were awake again.  It pays not
+to be in too much of a hurry to know things in the "Hills."
+
+As it happened, he asked no more questions, for there came a shout
+at the cave entrance whose purport he did not catch, and within five
+minutes after that, without a word of explanation, the cave was left
+empty of all except his own five men.  They carried away the men
+too sick to walk and vanished, snatching the last man away almost
+before King's fingers had finished tying the bandage on his wound.
+ 
+"Why is that?" he asked Ismail.  "Why did they go?  Who shouted?"
+
+"It is night," Ismail answered.  "It was time."
+
+King stared about him.  He had not realized until then that without
+aid of the lamps he could not see his own hand held out in front
+of him;  his eyes had grown used to the gloom, like those of the
+surgeons in the sick-bays below the water line in Nelson's fleet.
+
+"But who shouted?"
+
+"Who knows?  There is only one here who gives orders.  We be many
+who obey," said Ismail.
+
+"Whose men were the last ones?" King asked him, trying a new line.
+
+"Bull-with-a-beard's."
+
+"And whose man art thou, Ismail?"
+
+The Afridi hesitated, and when he spoke at last there was not quite
+the same assurance in his voice as once there had been.
+
+"I am hers!  Be thou hers, too!  But it is night.  Sleep against
+the toil tomorrow.  There be many sick in Khinjan."
+
+King made a little effort to clean the cave, but the task was hopeless.
+For one thing he was so weary that his very bones were water;  for
+another, Ismail pretended to be equally tired, and when the suggestion
+that they should help was put to the others they claimed their izzat
+indignantly.  Izzat and sharm (honor and shame) are the two scarcely
+distinguishable enemies of honest work, into whose teeth it takes
+both nerve and resolution to drive a Hillman at the best of times.
+Nerve King had, but his resolution was asleep.  He was too tired
+to care.
+
+He appointed them to two-hour watches, to relieve one another until
+dawn, and flung himself on a clean bed.  He was asleep before his
+head had met the pillow;  and for all he knew to the contrary he
+dreamed of Yasmini all night long.
+
+It seemed to him that she came into the cave--she the woman of the
+faded photograph the general had given him in Peshawur--and that
+the cave became filled with the strange intoxicating scent that
+had first wooed his senses in her reception room in Delhi.
+
+He dreamed that she called him by name.  First, "King sahib!"  Then,
+"Kurram Khan!"  And her voice was surprisingly familiar. But dreams
+are strange things.
+
+"He sleeps!" said the same voice presently.  "It is good that he sleeps!"
+And in his sleep he thought that a shadowy Ismail grunted an answer.
+
+After that he was very sure in his dream that it was good to sleep,
+although a voice he did not recognize and that he was quite sure was
+a dream-voice, kept whispering to him to wake up and protect himself.
+
+But the scent grew stronger, and he began to dream of cobras, that
+danced with a woman and struck at her so swiftly that she had to
+become two women in order to avoid them;  and Rewa Gunga came and
+laughed at both and called them amateurs, so that the woman became
+enraged and drew a bronze-bladed dagger with a golden hilt.
+
+Then intelligible dreams ceased altogether, and he, slept like a
+dead man, but with a vague suggestion ever with him that Yasmini
+was not very far away, and that she was interested in him to a point
+that was actually embarrassing.  It was like the ether-dream he
+once dreamt in a hospital.
+
+When he awoke at last it was after dawn, and light shone down the
+passage into his cave.
+ 
+"Ismail!" he shouted, for he was thirsty.  But there was no answer.
+
+"Darya Khan!"
+
+Again there was no answer.  He called each of the other men by name
+with the same result.
+
+He got up and realized then for the first time that he had not
+undressed himself the night before.  His head felt heavy, and
+although he did not believe he had been drugged, there was a scent
+he half-recognized that permeated the cave, and even overcame the
+dreadful atmosphere that the sick of yesterday had left behind.  He
+decided to go to the cave mouth, summon his men, who were no doubt
+sleeping as he had done, sniff the fresh air outside and come back
+to try the scent again;  he would know then whether his nose were
+deceiving him.
+
+But there was no Ismail near the entrance--no Darya Khan--nor any
+of the other men.  The horse was gone.  So was the mule.  So was
+the harness, and everything he had, except the drugs and instruments
+and the presents the sick had given him;  he had noticed all those
+still lying about in confusion when he woke.
+
+"Ismail!" he shouted at the top of his lungs, thinking they might
+all be outside.
+
+He heard a man hawk and spit, close to the entrance, and went out
+to see.  A man whom he had never seen before leaned on a magazine
+rifle and eyed him as a tiger eyes its prey.
+
+"No farther!" he growled, bringing his rifle to the port.
+
+"Why not?" King asked him.
+
+"Allah!  When a camel dies in the Khyber do the kites ask why?  Go in!"
+
+He thought then of Yasmini's bracelet, that always gained him at
+least civility from every man who saw it. He held up his left wrist
+and knew that instant why it felt uncomfortable. The bracelet has
+disappeared!
+
+He turned back into the cave to hunt for it, and the strange scent
+greeted him again.  In spite of the surrounding stench of drugs
+and filthy wounds, there was no mistaking it.  If it had been her
+special scent in Delhi, as Saunders swore it was, and her special
+scent on the note Darya Khan had carried down the Khyber, then it
+was hers now, and she had been in the cave.
+
+He hunted high and low and found no bracelet.
+
+His pistol was gone, too, and his cartridges, but not the dagger,
+wrapped in a handkerchief, under his shirt.  The money, that his
+patients had brought him, lay on the floor untouched.  It was an
+unusual robber who had robbed him.
+
+At least once in his life (or he were not human, but an angel) it
+dawns on a man that he has done the unforgivable.  It dawns on most
+men oftener than once a week.  So men learn sympathy.
+
+"I should have been awake to change the guard every two hours!"
+he admitted, sitting on the bed.  "I wouldn't hesitate to shoot
+another man for that--or for less!"
+
+He let the thought sink in, until the very lees of shame tasted
+like ashes in his mouth.  Then, being what he was,--and there are
+not very many men good enough to shoulder what lay ahead of him--he
+set the whole affair behind him as part of the past and looked forward.
+
+"Who's 'Bull-with-a-beard'?" he wondered.  "Nobody interfered with
+me until I doctored his men.  He's in opposition.  That's a fair
+guess.  Now, who in thunder--by the fat lord Harry--can 'Bull-with-
+a-beard' be?  And why fighting in the Khyber so early as all this?
+And why does 'Bull-with-a-beard,' whoever he is, hang back?"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+
+
+
+Are jackals a tiger's friends because they flatter him and eat
+his leavings?
+Choose, ye with stripes and proud whiskers, choose between friend
+and enemy. ---Native Proverb
+
+
+They came and changed the guard two hours after dawn, to the
+accompaniment of a lot of hawking and spitting, orders growled
+through the mist, and the crash of rifle-butts grounding on the
+rock path.  King went to the cave entrance, to look the new man
+over;  but because he was in Khinjan, and Khinjan in the "Hills,"
+where indirectness is the key to information, he stood for a while
+at gaze, listening to the thunder of tumbling water and looking
+at the cliff-edge six feet away that was laid like a knife in the
+ascending mist.
+
+Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that the new man was a
+Mahsudi--no sweeter to look at and no less treacherous for the fact.
+Also, that he had boils all over the back of his neck.  He was not
+likely to be better tempered because of that fact, either.  But
+it is an ill wind that blows no good to the Secret Service.
+
+"There is an end to everything," he remarked presently, addressing
+the world at large, or as much as he could see of it through the
+cave mouth.  "A hill is so high, a pool so deep, a river so wide.
+How long, for instance, must thy watch be?"
+
+"What is that to thee?" the fellow growled.
+
+"There is an end to pain!" said King, adjusting his horn-rimmed
+spectacles.  "I lanced a man's boils last night, and it hurt him,
+but he must be well to-day."
+
+"Get in!" growled the guard.  "She says it is sorcery! She says
+none are to let thee touch them!"
+
+Plainly, he was in no receptive mood;  orders had been spat into
+his hairy ear too recently.
+
+"Get in!" he growled, lifting his rifle-butt as if to enforce the order.
+
+"I can heal boils!" said King, retiring into the cave.  Then, from
+a safe distance down the passage, he added a word or two to sink
+in as the hours went by.
+
+"It is good to be able to bend the neck without pain and to rest
+easily at night!  It is good not to flinch at another's touch.
+Boils are bad!  Healing is easy and good!"
+
+Then, since a quarrel was the very last thing he was looking for,
+he retired into his own gloomy quarters at the rear, taking care
+to sit so that he could see and overhear what passed at the entrance.
+Among other things in the course of the day he noticed that the
+watch was changed every four hours and that there were only three
+men in the guard, for the same man was back again that evening.
+
+At intervals throughout the day Yasmini sent him food by silent
+messengers;  so he ate, for "the thing to do," says Cocker, "is
+the first that comes to hand, and the thing not to do is worry."
+It is not easy to worry and eat heartily at one and the same time.
+Having eaten, he rolled up his sleeves and native-made cotton
+trousers and proceeded to clean the cave.  After that he overhauled
+his stock of drugs and instruments, repacking them and making
+ready against opportunity.
+
+"As I told that heathen with a gun out there, there's an end to
+everything!" he reflected.  "May this come soon!"
+
+When they changed the guard that afternoon he had grown weary of
+his own company and of fruitless speculation and was pacing up and
+down.  The second guard proved even less communicative than the first,
+up to the point when, to lessen his ennui, King began to whistle.
+Because a Secret Service man must be consistent, the tune was not
+English, but a weird minor one to which the "Hills" have set their
+favorite love song (that is, all about hate in the concrete!).
+
+The echo of the waterfall within the cave was like the roaring in
+a shell held to the ear, but each time he came near the entrance
+the new guard could catch a few bars of the tune.  After a little
+while the hook-nosed ruffian began to sing the words to it, in a
+voice like a forgotten dog's.
+
+So he stopped at the entrance and changed the tune.  And the guard
+sang the words of the new tune, too.  After that he came out into
+the light of day (direct sunlight was cut off by the huge height
+of the cliffs all around) and leaned in the entrance, smiling.
+
+"Allah preserve thee, brother!" he remarked.  "Thine is a voice
+like a warrior's--bold and big!  Thou art a true son of the Prophet!"
+
+"Aye!" said the fellow, "that I am!  Allah preserve thee, for thou
+hast more need of it than I, although I guard thee just at present.
+Whistle me another one!"
+
+So King whistled the refrain of a song that boasts of an Afghan
+invasion of India, and of the loot that came of it, and the prisoners,
+and the women--particularly the women, mentioning more than a few
+of them by name, and their charms in detail.  It was a song to
+warm the very cockles of a Hillman's heart.  Nothing could have
+been better chosen for that setting, of a cave mouth half-way down
+the side of a gash in earth's wildest mountains, with the blue
+sky resting on a jagged rim a mile above.
+
+"Good!" said the bearded jailer.  "Now begin again and I will sing!"
+
+He threw his head back and howled until the mountain walls rang
+with the song, and other men in far-off caves took it up and howled
+it back at him.  When he left off singing at last, to drink from
+a water-bottle, that surely had been looted from a British soldier,
+King decided to be done with overtures and make the next move in
+the game.
+
+"Didst thou ever sing for her?" he asked, and the man turned round
+to stare at him as if he were mad, King saw then a blood-soaked
+bandage on the right of his neck, not very far from the jugular.
+
+"When she sings we are silent!  When she is silent it is good to
+wait a while and see!" he answered
+
+"Hah!" said King.  "Was that wound got in the Khyber the other day?"
+
+"Nay.  Here in Khinjan.  I had my thumb in a man's eye, and the
+bastard bit me!  May devils do worse to him where he has gone!
+I threw him into Earth's Drink!"
+
+"A good place for one's enemies!" laughed King.
+
+"Aye!"
+
+"A man told me last night," said King, drawing on imagination without
+any compunction at all, "that the fight in the Khyber was because
+a jihad is launched aleady."
+
+"That man lied!" said the guard, shifting position uneasily, as
+if afraid to talk too much.
+ 
+"So I told him!" answered King.  "I told him there never will be
+another jihad."'
+
+"Then art thou a greater liar than he!" the guard answered hotly.
+"There will be a jihad when she is ready, such an one as never yet was!
+India shall bleed for all the fat years she has lain unplundered!
+Not a throat of an unbeliever in the world shall be left un-slit!
+No jihad?  Thou liar!  Get in out of my sight!"
+
+So King retired into the cave, with something new to think about.
+Was she planning the jihad!  Or pretending to plan one?  Every once
+in a while the guard leaned far into the cave mouth and buried
+adjectives at him, the mildest of which was a well of information.
+If his temper was the temper of the "Hills," it was easy to read
+disappointment for a jihad that should have been already but had
+been postponed.
+
+When they changed the guard again the new man proved surly.  There
+was no getting a word out of him.  He showed dirty yellow teeth
+in a wolfish snarl, and his only answer was a lifted rifle and a
+crooked forefinger.  King let him alone and paced the cave for hours.
+
+He was squatting on his bed-end in the dark, like a spectacled
+image of Buddha, when the first of the three men came on guard
+again and at last Ismail came for him holding a pitchy torch that
+filled the dim passage full of acrid smoke and made both of them,
+cough.  Ismail was red-eyed with it.
+
+"Come!" he growled.  "Come, little hakim!"  Then he turned on his
+heel at once, as if afraid of being twitted with desertion.  He
+seemed to want to get outside, where he could keep out of range
+of words, yet not to wish to seem unfriendly.
+
+But King made no effort to speak to him, following in silence out
+on to the dark ledge above the waterfall and noticing that the
+guard with the boils was back again on duty.  He grinned evilly
+out of a shadow as King passed.
+
+"Make an end!" he advised, spitting over the Cliff into thunderous
+darkness to illustrate the suggestion.  "Jump, hakim, before a
+worse thing happens!"
+
+To add further point be kicked a loose stone over the edge, and
+the movement caused him to bend his neck and so inadvertently to
+hurt his boils.  He cursed, and there was pity in King's voice
+when he spoke next.
+
+"Do they hurt thee?"
+
+"Aye, like the devil!  Khinjan is a place of plagues!"
+
+"I could heal them," King said, passing on, and the man stared hard.
+
+"Come!" boomed Ismail through the darkness, shaking the torch to
+make it burn better and beckoning impatiently, and King hurried
+after him, leaving behind a savage at the cave mouth who fingered
+his sores and wondered, muttering, leaning on a rifle, muttering
+and muttering again as if he had seen a new light.
+
+Instead of waiting for King to catch up, Ismail began to lead the
+way at great speed along a path that descended gradually until it
+curved round the end of the chasm and plunged into a tunnel where
+the darkness grew opaque.  In the tunnel the torch's smoke cast
+weird shadows on walls and roof, and the fitful light only confused,
+so that Ismail slowed down and let him come up close.
+
+Then for thirty minutes he led swiftly down a crazy devil's stairway
+of uneven boulders, stopping to lend a hand at the worst places,
+but everlastingly urging him to hurry.  They were both breathless,
+and King was bruised in a dozen places when they reached level
+going at least six or seven hundred feet below the cave from which
+they started.
+
+Then the hell-mouth gloom began to grow faintly luminous, and the
+waterfall's thunder burst on their ears from close at hand.  They
+emerged into fresh wet air and a sea of sound, on a rock ledge
+like the one above.  Ismail raised the torch and waved it.  The
+fire and smoke wandered up, until they flattened on a moving opal
+dome, that prisoned all the noises in the world.
+
+"Earth's Drink!" he announced, waving the torch and then shutting
+his mouth tight, as if afraid to voice sacrilege.
+
+It was the river, million-colored in the torch-light, pouring from
+a half-mile-long slash in the cliff above them and plunging past
+them through the gloom toward the very middle of the world.  Its
+width was a matter of memory, and its depth unguessable, for although
+dim moonlight filtered through it, he did not know where the moon was,
+nor how far such light could penetrate through moving water.
+Somewhere it met rock-bottom and boiled there, for a roar like the
+sea's came up from deeps unimaginable.
+
+He watched the overturning dome until his senses reeled.  Then he
+crawled on hands and knees to the ledge's brink and tried to peer
+over.  But Ismail dragged him back.
+
+"Come!" he howled; but in all that din his shout was like a whisper.
+
+"How deep is it?" King bellowed back.
+
+"Allah!  Ask Him who made it!"
+
+The fear of the falls was on the Afridi, and he tugged at King's
+arm in a frenzy of impatience. Suddenly he let go and broke into
+a run.  King trotted after him, afraid too, to look to right or left,
+lest the fear should make him throw himself over the brink.  The
+thunder and the hugeness had their grip on him and had begun to
+numb his power to think and his will to be a man.  Suddenly when
+they had run a hundred yards, Ismail turned sharp to the right into
+a tunnel that led straight back into the cliff and sloped uphill.
+As the din of the falls grew less behind him and his power to think
+returned, King calculated that they must be following the main
+direction of the river bed, but edging away gradually to the right
+of it.  After ten minutes' hurrying uphill he guessed they must
+be level with the river, in a tunnel running nearly parallel.
+
+He proved to be right, for they came to a gap in the wall, and
+Ismail thrust the torch through it.  The light shone on swift black
+water, and a wind rushed through the gap that nearly blew the torch out.
+It accounted altogether for the dryness of the rock and the fresh air
+in the tunnel.  The river's weight seemed to suck a hurricane along
+with it--air enough for a million men to breathe.
+
+After that there was no more need to stop at intervals and beat
+the torch against the wall to make it burn brightly, for the wind
+fanned it until the flame was nearly white.  Ismail kept looking
+back to bid King hurry and never paused once to rest.
+
+"Come!" be urged fiercely.  "This leads to the 'Heart of the Hills'!"
+And after that King had to do his best to keep the Afridi's back
+in sight.
+
+They began after a time to hear voices and to see the smoky glare
+made by other torches.  Then Ismail set the pace yet faster, and
+they became the last two of a procession of turbaned men, who tramped
+along a winding tunnel into a great mountain's womb.  The sound
+of slippers clicking and rutching on the rock floor swelled and
+died and swelled again as the tunnel led from cavern into cavern.
+
+In one great cave they came to every man beat out his torch and
+tossed it on a heap.  The heap was more than shoulder high, and
+three parts covered the floor of the cave.  After that there was
+a ledge above the height of a man's head on either side of the tunnel,
+and along the ledge little oil-burning lamps were spaced at measured
+intervals.  They looked ancient enough to have been there when the
+mountain itself was born, and although all the brass ones suggested
+Indian and Hindu origin, there were others among them of earthenware
+that looked like plunder from ancient Greece.
+
+It was like a transposition of epochs.  King felt already as if
+the twentieth century had never existed, just as he seemed to have
+left life behind for good and all when the mosque door had closed
+on him.
+
+A quarter of a mile farther along the tunnel opened into another,
+yet greater cave, and there every man kicked off his slippers,
+without seeming to trouble how they lay;  they littered the floor
+unarranged and uncared for, looking like the cast-off wing-cases
+of gigantic beetles.
+
+After that cave there were two sharp turns in the tunnel, and then
+at last a sea of noise and a veritable blaze of light.
+
+Part of the noise made King feel homesick, for out of the mountain's
+very womb brayed a music-box, such as the old-time carousels made
+use of before the days of electricity and steam.  It was being
+worked by inexpert hands, for the time was something jerky;  but it
+was robbed of its tinny meanness and even majesty by the hugeness of
+a cavern's roof, as well as by the crashing, swinging march it played--
+wild  -wonderful--invented for lawless hours and a kingless people.
+
+"Marchons!--Citoyens!--"
+
+The procession began to tramp in time to it, and the rock shook.
+They deployed to left and right into a space so vast that the eye
+at first refused to try to measure it.  It was the hollow core of
+a mountain, filled by the sea-sound of a human crowd and hung with
+huge stalactites that danced and shifted and flung back a thousand
+colors at the flickering light below.
+
+There was an undertone to the clangor of the music-box and the
+human hum, for across the cavern's farther end for a space of two
+hundred yards the great river rushed, penned here into a deep trough
+of less than a tenth its normal width--plunging out of a great
+fanged gap and hurrying out of view down another one, licking smooth
+banks on its way with a hungry sucking sound.  Its depth where it
+crossed the cavern's end could only be guessed by remembering the
+half-mile breadth of the waterfall.
+
+There were little lamps everywhere, perched on ledges amid the
+stalactites, and they suffused the whole cavern in golden glow,
+made the crowd's faces look golden and cast golden shimmers on the
+cold, black river bed.  There was scarcely any smoke, for the wind
+that went like a storm down the tunnel seemed to have its birth here;
+the air was fresh and cool and never still.  No doubt fresh air
+was pouring in continually through some shaft in the rock, but the
+shaft was invisible.
+
+In the midst of the cavern a great arena had been left bare, and
+thousands of turbaned men squatted round it in rings.  At the end
+where the river formed a tangent to them the rings were flattened,
+and at that point they were cut into by the ramp of a bridge, and
+by a lane left to connect the bridge with the arena.  The bridge
+was almost the most wonderful of all.
+
+So delicately formed that fairies might have made it with a guttered
+candle, it spanned the river in one splendid sweep, twenty feet
+above water, like a suspension bridge.  Then, so light and graceful
+that it scarcely seemed to touch anything at all, it swept on in
+irregular arches downward to the arena and ceased abruptly as if
+shorn off by a giant ax, at a point less than half-way to it.
+
+Its end formed a nearly square platform, about fourteen feet above
+the floor, and the broad track thence to the arena, as well as all
+the arena's boundary, had been marked off by great earthenware lamps,
+whose greasy smoke streaked up and was lost by the wind among the
+stalactites.
+
+"Greek lamps, every one of 'em!" King whispered to himself, but
+he wasted no time just then on trying to explain how Greek lamps
+had ever got there.  There was too much else to watch and wonder at.
+
+No steps led down from the bridge end to the floor;  toward the arena
+it was blind.  But from the bridge's farther end across the hurrying
+water stairs had been hewn out of the rock wall and led up to a hole
+of twice a man's height, more than fifty feet above water level.
+
+On either side of the bridge end a passage had been left clear to
+the river edge, and nobody seemed to care to invade it, although
+it was not marked off in any way.  Each passage was about fifty feet
+wide and quite straight. But the space between the bridge end and
+the arena, and the arena itself, had to be kept free from trespassers
+by fifty swaggering ruffians armed to the teeth.
+
+Every man of the thousands there had a knife in evidence, but the
+arena guards had magazine rifles well as Khyber tulwars.  Nobody
+else wore firearms openly.  Some of the arena guards bore huge round
+shields of  prehistoric pattern of a size and sort he had never
+seen before, even in museums.  But there was very little that he
+was seeing that night of a kind that he had seen before anywhere!
+
+The guards lolled insolently, conscious of brute strength and special
+favor.  When any man trespassed with so much as a toe beyond the
+ring of lamps, a  guard would slap his rifle-butt until the swivels
+rattled and the offender would scurry into bounds amid the jeers
+of any who had seen.
+
+Shoving, kicking and elbowing with set purpose, Ismail forced a
+way through the already seated crowd, and drew King down into the
+cramped space beside him, close enough to the arena to be able to
+catch the guards' low laughter.  But he was restless.  He wished
+to get nearer yet, only there seemed no room anywhere in front.
+
+The music-box was hidden.  King could see it nowhere.  Five minutes
+after he and Ismail were seated it stopped playing.  The hum of
+the crowd died too.
+
+Then a guard threw his shield down with a clang and deliberately
+fired his rifle at the roof.  The ricocheting bullet brought down
+a shower of splintered stone and stalactite, and he grinned as he
+watched the crowd dodge to avoid it.  Before they had done dodging
+and while he yet grinned, a chant began--ghastly--tuneless--so out
+of time that the words were not intelligible--yet so obvious in
+general meaning that nobody could hear it and not understand.
+
+It was a devils' anthem, glorifying hellishness--suggestive of the
+gnashing of a million teeth, and the whicker of drawn blades--more
+shuddersome and mean than the wind of a winter's night.  And it
+ceased as suddenly as it had begun.
+
+Another ruffian fired at the roof, and while the crack of the shot
+yet echoed seven other of the arena guards stepped forward with
+long horns and blew a blast.  That was greeted by a yell that made
+the cavern tremble.
+
+Instantly a hundred men rose from different directions and raced
+for the arena, each with a curved sword in either hand.  The yelling
+changed back into the chant, only louder than before, and by that
+much more terrible.  Cymbals crashed.  The music-box resumed its
+measured grinding of The Marseillaise.  And the hundred began an
+Afridi sword dance, than which there is nothing wilder in all the
+world.  Its like can only be seen under the shadow of the "Hills."
+
+Ismail put his hands together and howled through them like a wolf
+on the war-path, nudging King with an elbow.  So King imitated him,
+although one extra shout in all that din seemed thrown away.
+
+The dancers pranced in a circle, each man whirling both swords
+around his head and the head of the man in front of him at a speed
+that passed belief.  Their long black hair shook and swayed.  The
+sweat began to pour from them until their arms and shoulders glistened.
+The speed increased.  Another hundred men leaped in, forming a new
+ring outside the first, only facing the other way.  Another hundred
+and fifty formed a ring outside them again, with the direction again
+reversed;  and two hundred and fifty more formed an outer circle--
+all careering at the limit of their power, gasping as the beasts
+do in the fury of fighting to the death, slitting the air until
+it whistled, with swords that missed human heads by  immeasurable
+fractions of an inch.
+
+Ismail seemed obsessed by the spirit of hell let loose--drawn by it,
+as by a magnet, although subsequent events proved him not to have
+been altogether without a plan.  He got up, with his eyes fixed
+on the dance, and dragged King with him to a place ten rows nearer
+the arena, that had been vacated by a dancer.  There--two, where
+there was only rightly room for one--he thrust himself and King
+next to some Orakzai Pathans, elbowing savagely to right and left
+to make room.  And patience proved scarce.  The instant oaths of
+anything but greeting were like overture to a dog fight.
+
+"Bismillah!" swore the nearest man, deigning to use intelligible
+sentences at last.  "Shall a dog of an Afridi bustle me?"
+
+He reached for the ever-ready Pathan knife, and Ismail, with both
+eyes on the dancing, neither heard nor saw.  The Pathan leaned past
+King to stab, but paused in the instant that his knife licked clear.
+From a swift side-glance at King's face be changed to full stare,
+his scowl slowly giving place to a grin as he recognized him.
+
+"Allah!"
+
+He drove the long blade back again, fidgeting about to make more
+room and kicking out at his next neighbor to the same end, so that
+presently King sat on the rock floor instead of on other men's hip-bones.
+ 
+"Well met, hakim!  See--the wound heals finely!"
+
+Baring his shoulder under the smelly sheepskin coat, he lifted a
+bandage gingerly to show the clean opening out of which King had
+coaxed a bullet the day before.  It looked wholesome and ready to heal.
+
+"Name thy reward, hakim!  We Orakzai Pathans forget no favors!"
+(Now that boast was a true one.)
+
+King glanced to his left and saw that there was no risk of being
+overheard or interrupted by Ismail;  the Afridi was beating his
+fists together, rocking from side to side in frenzy, and letting
+out about one yell a minute that would have curdled a wolf's heart.
+
+"Nay, I have all I need!" he answered, and the Pathan laughed.
+
+"In thine own time, hakim!  Need forgets none of us!"
+
+"True!" said King.
+
+He nodded more to himself than to the other man.  He needed, for
+instance, very much to know who was planning a jihad, and who "Bull-
+with-a-beard" might be;  but it was not safe to confide just yet
+in a chance-made acquaintance.  A very fair acquaintance with some
+phases of the East had taught him that names such as Bull-with-a-
+beard are often almost photographically descriptive.  He rose to
+his feet to look.  A blind man can talk, but it takes trained eyes
+to gather information.
+
+The din had increased, and it was safe to stand up and stare, because
+all eyes were on the madness in the middle.  There were plenty
+besides himself who stood to get a better view, and he had to dodge
+from side to side to see between them.
+
+"I'm not to doctor his men.  Therefore it's a fair guess that he
+and I are to be kept apart.  Therefore he'll be as far away from
+me now as possible, supposing he's here."
+
+Reasoning along that line, he tried to see the face on the far side,
+but the problem was to see over th dancers' heads.  He succeeded
+presently, for the Orakzai Pathan saw what he wanted, and in his
+anxiety to be agreeable, reached forward to pull back a box from
+between the ranks in front.
+
+Its owners offered instant fight, but made no further objection
+when they saw who wanted it and why.  King wondered at their sudden
+change of mind, the Pathan looked actually grieved that a fight
+should have been spared him.  He tried, with a few barbed insults,
+to rearouse a spark of enmity, but failed, to his own great discontent.
+
+The box was a commonplace affair, built square, of pine, and had
+probably contained somebody's new helmet at one stage of its career.
+The stenciled marks on its sides and top had long ago become
+obliterated by wear and dirt.
+
+King got up on it and gazed long at the rows of spectators on the
+far side, and having no least notion what to look for, he studied
+the faces one by one.
+
+"If he's important enough for her to have it in for him, he'll not
+be far from the front," he reasoned and with that in mind he picked
+out several bull-necked, bearded men, any one of whom could easily
+have answered to the description.         There were too many of them
+to give him any comfort, until the thought occurred to him that a
+man with brains enough to be a leader would not be so obsessed and
+excited by mere prancing athleticism as those men were.  Then he
+looked farther along the line.
+ 
+He found a man soon who was not interested in the dancing, but who
+had eyes and ears apparently for everything and everybody else.
+He watched him for ten minutes, until at last their eyes met.  Then
+he sat down and kicked the box back to its owners.
+
+He looked again at Ismail.  With teeth clenched and eyes ablaze,
+the Afridi was smashing his knuckles together and rocking to and fro.
+There was no need to fear him.  He turned and touched the Pathan's
+broad shoulder.  The man smiled and bent his turbaned head to listen.
+
+"Opposite," said King, "nearly exactly opposite--three rows back
+from the front, counting the front row as one--there sits a man
+with his arm in a sling and a bandage over his eye."
+
+The Pathan nodded and touched his knife-hilt.
+
+"One-and-twenty men from him, counting him as one, sits a man with
+a big black beard, whose shoulders are like a bull's.  As he sits
+he hangs his head between them--thus."
+
+"And you want him killed?  Nay, I think you mean Muhammad Anim.
+His time is not yet."
+
+The suggestion was as good-naturedly prompt as if the hakim's need
+had been water, and the other's flask were empty.  He was sorry he
+could not offer to oblige.
+
+"Who am I that I should want him killed?" King answered with mild
+reproof.  "My trade is to heal, not slay. I am a hakim."
+
+The other nodded.
+
+"Yet, to enter Khinjan Caves you had to slay a man, hakim or no!"
+
+"He was an unbeliever," King answered modestly, and the other nodded
+again with friendly understanding.
+ 
+"What about the man yonder, then?" the Pathan asked.  "What will
+you have of him?"
+
+"Look!  See!  Tell me truly what his name is!"
+
+The Pathan got up and strode forward to stand on the box, kicking
+aside the elbows that leaned on it and laughing when the owners
+cursed him.  He stood on it and stared for five minutes, counting
+deliberately three times over, striking a finger on the palm of
+his hand to check himself.
+
+"Bull-with-a-beard!" he announced at last, dropping back into place
+beside King. "Muhammad Anim.  The mullah Muhammad Anim."
+
+"An Afghan?" King asked.
+
+"He says he is an Afghan.  But unless he lies he is from Isbtamboul
+(Constantinople)."
+
+Itching to ask more questions, King sat still and held his peace.
+The direr the need of information in the "Hills," and in all the
+East for that matter, the greater the wisdom, as a rule, of seeming
+uninquisitive.  And wisdom was rewarded now, for the Pathan, who
+would have dried up under eager questioning, grew talkative.
+Civility and volubility are sometimes one, and not always only
+among the civilized.  King--the hakim Kurram Khan--blinked mildly
+behind his spectacles and looked like one to whom a savage might
+safely ease his mind.
+
+"He bade me go to Sikaram where my village is and bring him a hundred
+men for his lashkar.  He says he has her special favor.  Wait and
+watch, I say!
+
+"Has he money?" asked King, apparently drawing a bow at a venture for
+conversation's sake.  But there is an art in asking artless questions.
+
+"Aye!  The liar says the Germans gave it to him!  He swears they
+will send more.  Who are the Germans?  Who is a man who talks of
+a jihad that is to be, that he should have gold coin given him by
+unbelievers?  I saw a German once, at Nuklao.  He ate pig-meat and
+washed it down with wine.  Are such men sons of the Prophet?  Wait
+and watch, say I!"
+
+"Money?" said King.  "He admits it?  And none dare kill him for it?
+You say his time is not yet come?"
+
+More than ever it was obvious that the hakim was a very simple man.
+The Pathan made a gesture of contempt.
+
+"I dare what I will, hakim!  But he says there is more money on
+the way!  When he has it all--why--we are all in Allah's keeping--
+He decides!"
+
+"And should no more money come?"
+
+This was courteous conversation and received as such--many a long
+league removed from curiosity.
+
+"Who am I to foretell a man's kismet?  I know what I know, and I
+think what I think!  I know thee, hakim, for a gentle fellow, who
+hurt me almost not at all in the drawing of a bullet out of my flesh.
+What knowest thou about me?"
+
+"That I will dress the wound for thee again!"
+
+Artless statements are as useful in their way as artless questions.
+Let the guile lie deep, that is all.
+
+"Nay, nay!  For she said nay!  Shall I fall foul of her, for the
+sake of a new bandage?"
+
+The temptation was terrific to ask why she had given that order,
+but King resisted it;  and presently it occurred to the Pathan that
+his own theories on the subject might be of interest.
+
+"She will use thee for a reward," he said.  "He who shall win and
+keep her favor may have his hurts dressed and his belly dosed. Her
+enemies may rot."
+ 
+"Who is fool enough to be her enemy?" asked King, the altogether
+mild and guileless.
+
+The Pathan stuck out his tongue and squezed his nose with one finger
+until it nearly disappeared into his face.
+
+"If she calls a man enemy, how shall he prove otherwise?" he answered.
+Then he rolled off center, to pull out his great snuff-box from the
+leather bag at his waist.
+
+"Does she call the mullah Muhammad Anim enemy?" King asked him.
+
+"Nay, she never mentions him by name."
+
+"Art thou a man of thy word?" King asked.
+
+"When it suits me."
+
+"There was a promise regarding my reward."
+
+"Name it, hakim!  We will see."
+
+"Go tell the mullah Muhammad Anim where I sit!"
+
+The fellow laughed.  He considered himself tricked;  one could read
+that plainly enough;  for taking polite messages does not come within
+the Hills' elastic code of izzat, although carrying a challenge is
+another matter.  Yet he felt grateful for the hakim's service and
+was ready to seize the first cheap means of squaring the indebtedness.
+
+"Keep my place!" he ordered, getting up.  He growled it, as some
+men speak to dogs, because growling soothed his ruffled vanity.
+
+He helped himself noisily to snuff then and began to clear a passage,
+kicking out to right and left and laughing when his victims protested.
+Before he had traversed fifty yards he had made himself more enemies
+than most men dare aspire to in a lifetime, and he seemed well
+pleased with the fruit of his effort.
+
+The dance went on for fifteen minutes yet, but then--quite unexpectedly--
+all the arena guards together fired a volley at the roof, and the dance
+stopped as if every dancer had been hit.  The spectators were set
+surging by the showers of stone splinters, that hurt whom they struck,
+and their snarl was like a wolf-pack's when a tiger interferes.  But
+the guards thought it all a prodigious joke and the more the crowd
+swore the more they laughed.
+
+Panting--foaming at the mouth, some of them--the dancers ran to
+their seats and set the crowd surging again, leaving the arena empty
+of all but the guards.  The man whose seat Ismail had taken came
+staggering, slippery with sweat, and squeezed himself where he belonged,
+forcing King into the Pathan's empty place.  Ismail threw his arms
+round the man and patted him, calling him "mighty dancer," "son of
+the wind," "prince of prancers," "prince of swordsmen," "war-horse,"
+and a dozen more endearing epithets.  The fellow lay back across
+Ismail's knees, breathless but well enough contented.
+
+And after a few more minutes the Orakzai Pathan came back, and King
+tried to make room for him to sit.
+
+"I bade thee keep my place!" he growled, towering over King and
+plucking at his knife-belt irresolutely.  He made it clear without
+troubling to use words that any other man would have had to fight,
+and the hakim might think himself lucky.
+
+"Take my seat," said King, struggling to get up.
+
+"Nay, nay--sit still, thou.  I can kick room for myself.  So!  So!  So!"
+
+There was an answering snarl of hate that seemed like a song to him,
+amid which he sat down.
+
+"The mullah Muhammad Anim answered he knows nothing of thee and
+cares less!  He said--and he said it with vehemence--it is no more
+to him where a hakim sits than where the rats hide!"
+
+He watched King's face and seeing that, King allowed his facial
+muscles to express chagrin.
+
+"Between us, it is a poor time for messages to him.  He is too full
+of pride that his lashkar should have beaten the British."
+
+"Did they beat the British greatly?" King asked him, with only
+vague interest on his face and a prayer inside him that his heart
+might flutter less violently against his ribs.  His voice was as
+non-committal as the mullah's message.
+
+"Who knows, when so many men would rather lie than kill?  Each one
+who returned swears he slew a hundred.  But some did not return.
+Wait and watch, say I!"
+
+Now a man stood up near the edge of the crowd whom King recognized;
+and recognition brought no joy with it.  The mullah without hair
+or eyelashes, who had admitted him and his party through the mosque
+into the Caves, strode out to the middle of the arena all alone,
+strutting and swaggering.  He recalled the man's last words and
+drew no consolation from them, either.
+
+"Many have entered!  Some went out by a different road!"
+
+Cold chills went down his back.  All at once Ismail's manner became
+unencouraging.  He ceased to make a fuss over the dancer and began
+to eye King sidewise, until at last he seemed unable to contain
+the malice that would well forth.
+
+"At the gate there were only words!" he whispered.  "Here in this
+cavern men wait for proof!"
+
+He licked his teeth suggestively, as a wolf does when he contemplates
+a meal.  Then, as an afterthought, as though ashamed, "I love thee!
+Thou art a man after my own heart!  But I am her man!  Wait and see!"
+
+The mullah in the arena, blinking with his lashless eyes, held both
+arms up for silence in the attitude of a Christian priest blessing
+a congregation.  The guards backed his silent demand with threatening
+rifles.  The din died to a hiss of a thousand whispers, and then
+the great cavern grew still, and only the river could be heard sucking
+hungrily between the smooth stone banks.
+
+"God is great!" the mullah howled.
+
+"God is great!" the crowd thundered in echo to him;  and then the
+vault took up the echoes.  "God is great--is great--is great--ea--
+ea--eat!"
+
+"And Muhammad is His prophet!" howled the mullah.  Instantly they
+answered him again.
+
+"And Muhammad is His prophet!"
+
+"His prophet--is His prophet--is His prophet!" said the stalactites,
+in loud barks--then in murmurs--then in awe-struck whispers.
+
+That seemed to be all the religious ritual Khinjan remembered or
+could tolerate.  Considering that the mullah, too, must have killed
+his man in cold blood before earning the right to be there, perhaps
+it was enough--too much.         There were men not far from King
+who shuddered.
+
+"There are strangers!" announced the mullah, as a man might say,
+"I smell a rat!"  But he did not look at anybody in particular;
+he blinked at the crowd.
+
+"Strangers!" said the stalactites, in an awe-struck whisper.
+
+"Show them!  Show them!  Let them stand forth!"
+
+"Oh-h-h-h-h! Let them stand forth!" said the roof.
+ 
+The mullah bowed as if that idea were a new one and he thought it
+better than his own;  for all crowds love flattery.
+
+"Bring them!" he shouted, and King suppressed a shudder--for what
+proof had he of right to be there beyond Ismail's verbal corroboration
+of a lie?  Would Ismail lie for him again? he wondered.  And if so,
+would the lie be any use?
+
+Not far from where King sat there was an immediate disturbance in
+the crowd, and a wretched-looking Baluchi was thrust forward at a run,
+with arms lashed to his sides and a pitiful look of terror on his face.
+Two more Baluchis were hustled along after him, protesting a little,
+but looking almost as hopeless.
+
+Once in the arena, the guards took charge of all three of them and
+lined them up facing the mullah, clubbing them with their rifle-butts
+to get quick obedience.  The crowd began to be noisy again, but the
+mullah signed for silence.
+
+"These are traitors!" he howled, with a gesture such as Ajax might
+have used when he defied the lightning.
+
+The roof said "Traitors!"
+
+"Slay them, then!" howled the crowd, delighted.  And blinking behind
+the horn-rimmed spectacles, King began to look about busily for hope,
+where there did not seem to be any.
+
+"Nay, hear me first!" the mullah howled, and his voice was like a
+wolf's at hunting time.  "Hear, and be warned!"
+
+The crowd grew very still, but King saw that some men licked their
+lips, as if they well knew what was coming.
+
+"These three men came, and one was a new man!" the mullah howled.
+"The other two were his witnesses!  All three swore that the first
+man came from slaying an unbeliever in the teeth of written law.
+They said he ran from the law.  So, as the custom is, I let all
+three enter!"
+
+"Good!" said the crowd.  "Good!"  They might have been five thousand
+judges, judging in equity, so grave they were.  Yet they licked
+their lips.
+
+"But later, word came to me saying they are liars.  So--again as
+the custom is--I ordered them bound and held!"
+
+"Slay them!  Slay them!" the crowd yelped, gleeful as a wolf-pack
+on a scent and abandoning solemnity as suddenly as it had been assumed.
+"Slay them!"
+
+They were like the wind, whipping in and out among Khinjan's rocks,
+savage and then still for a minute, savage and then still.
+
+"Nay, there is a custom yet!" the mullah howled, holding up both arms.
+And there was silence again like the lull before a hurricane, with
+only the great black river talking to itself.
+
+"Who speaks for them?  Does any speak for them?"
+
+"Speak for them?" said the roof.
+
+There was silence.  Then there was a murmur of astonishment.  Over
+opposite to where King sat the mullah stood up, who the Pathan had
+said was "Bull-with-a-beard"--Muhammad Anim.
+
+"The men are mine!" he growled.  His voice was like a bear's at bay;
+it was low, but it carried strangely.  And as he spoke he swung
+his great head between his shoulders, like a bear that means to
+charge.  "The proof they brought has been stolen!  They had good
+proof!  I speak for them!  The men are mine!"
+
+The Pathan nudged King in the ribs with an elbow like a club and
+tickled his ear with hot breath.
+
+"Bull-with-a-beard speaks truth!" he grinned.  "'Truth and a lie
+together!  Good may it do him and them!  They die, they three Baluchis!"
+
+"Proof!" howled the mullah who had no hair eyelashes.
+
+"Proof--oof--oof!" said the stalactites.
+
+"Proof!  Show us proof!" yelled the crowd.
+
+"Words at the gate--proof in the cavern!" howled the lashless one.
+ 
+The Pathan next King leaned over to whisper to him again, but
+stiffened in the act.  There was a great gasp the same instant,
+as the whole crowd caught its breath all together.  The mullah in
+the middle froze into mobility.  Bull-with-a-beard stood mumbling,
+swaying his great head from side to side, no longer suggestive of
+a bear about to charge, but of one who hesitates.
+
+The crowd was staring at the end of the bridge.  King stared, too,
+and caught his own breath.  For Yasmini stood there, smiling on
+them all as the new moon smiles down on the Khyber!  She had come
+among them like a spirit, all unheralded.
+
+So much more beautiful than the one likeness King had seen of her
+that for a second he doubted who she was--more lovely than he had
+imagined her even  in his dreams--she stood there, human and warm
+and real, who had begun to seem a myth, clad in gauzy transparent
+stuff that made no secret of sylph-like shapeliness and looking
+nearly light enough to blow away.  Her feet--and they were the
+most marvelously molded things he had ever seen--were naked and
+played restlessly on the naked stone.  Not one part of her was still
+for a fraction of a second;  yet the whole effect was of insolently
+lazy ease.
+
+Her eyes blazed brighter than the little jewels stitched to her
+gossamer dress, and when a man once looked at them he did not find
+it easy to look away again.  Even mullah Muhammad Anim seemed
+transfixed, like a great foolish animal.
+
+But King was staring very hard indeed at something else--mentally
+cursing the plain glass spectacles he wore, that had begun to film
+over and dim his vision.  There were two bracelets on her arm,
+both barbaric things of solid gold.  The smaller of the two was
+on her wrist and the larger on her upper arm, but they were so alike,
+except for size, and so exactly like the one Rewa Gunga had given
+him in her name and that had been stolen from him in the night,
+that he ran the risk of removing the glasses a moment to stare with
+unimpeded eyes . Even then the distance was too great.  He could
+not quite see.
+
+But her eyes began to search the crowd in his direction, and then
+he knew two things absolutely.  He was sitting where she had ordered
+Ismail to place him;  for she picked him out almost instantly, and
+laughed as if somebody had struck a silver bell.  And one of those
+bracelets was the one that he had worn;  for she flaunted it at him,
+moving her arm so that the light should make the gold glitter.
+
+Then, perhaps because the crowd bad begun to whisper, and she wanted
+all attention, she raised both arms to toss back the golden hair
+that came cascading nearly to her knees.  And as if the crowd knew
+that symptom well, it drew its breath in sharply and grew very still.
+
+"Muhammad Anim!" she said, and she might have been wooing him.  "That
+was a devil's trick!"
+
+It was rather an astounding statement, coming from lovely lips in
+such a setting.  It was rather suggestive of a driver's whiplash,
+flicked through the air for a beginning.  Muhammad Anim continued
+glaring and did not answer her, so in her own good time, when she
+had tossed her golden hair back once or twice again, she developed
+her meaning.
+
+"We who are free of Khinjan Caves do not send men out to bring
+recruits.  We know better than to bid our men tell lies for others
+at the gate.  Nor, seeking proof for our new recruit, do we send
+men to hunt a head for him--not even those of us who have a lashkar
+that we call our own, mullah Muhammad Anim.  Each of us earns his
+own way in!"
+
+The mullah Muhammad Anim began to stroke his beard, but he made
+no answer.
+
+"And--mullah Muhammad Anim, thou wandering man of God--when that
+lashkar has foolishly been sent and has failed, is it written in
+the Kalamullah saying we should pretend there was a head, and that
+the head was stolen?  A lie is a lie, Muhammad Anim!  Wandering
+perhaps is good, if in search of the way.  Is it good to lose the way,
+and to lie, thou true follower of the Prophet?"
+
+She smiled, tossing her hair back.  Her eyes challenged, her lips
+mocked him and her chin scorned.  The crowd breathed hard and watched.
+The mullah muttered something in his beard, and sat down, and the
+crowd began to roar applause at her.  But she checked it with a
+regal gesture, and a glance of contempt at the mullah that was alone
+worth a journey across the "Hills" to see.
+
+"Guards!" she said quietly.  And the crowd's sigh then was like
+the night wind in a forest.
+
+"Away with those three of Muhammad Anim's men!"
+
+Twelve of the arena guards threw down their shields with a sudden
+clatter and seized the prisoners, four to each.  The crowd shivered
+with delicious anticipation.  The doomed men neither struggled nor
+cried, for fatalism is an anodyne as well as an explosive.  King
+set his teeth.  Yasmini, with both hands behind her head, continued
+to smile down on them all as sweetly as the stars shine on a
+battle-field.
+
+She nodded once;  and then all was over in a minute.  With a ringing
+"Ho!" and a run, the guards lifted their victims shoulder high and
+bore them forward.  At the river bank they paused for a second to
+swing them.  Then, with another "Ho!" they threw them like dead
+rubbish into the swift black water.
+
+There was only one wild scream that went echoing and re-echoing
+to the roof.  There was scarcely a splash, and no extra ripple at all.
+No heads came up again to gasp.  No fingers clutched at the surface.
+The fearful speed of the river sucked them under, to grind and
+churn and pound them through long caverns underground and hurl
+them at last over the great cataract toward the middle of the world.
+
+"Ah-h-h-h-h!" sighed the crowd in ecstasy.
+
+"Is there no other stranger?" asked Yasmini, searching for King
+again with her amazing eyes.  The skin all down his back turned
+there and then into gooseflesh.  And as her eyes met his she laughed
+like a bell at him.  She knew!  She knew who he was, how he had
+entered, and how he felt.  Not a doubt of it!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XI
+
+
+Long slept the Heart o' the Hills, oh, long!
+(Ye who have watched, ye know!)
+As sap sleeps in the deodars
+When winter shrieks and steely stars
+Blink over frozen snow.
+Ye haste? The sap stirs now, ye say?
+Ye feel the pulse of spring?
+But sap must rise ere buds may break,
+Or cubs fare forth, or bees awake,
+Or lean buck spurn the ling!
+
+
+"Kurram Khan!" the lashless mullah howled, like a lone wolf in the
+moonlight, and King stood up.
+
+It is one of the laws of Cocker, who wrote the S. S. Code, that a
+man is alive until he is proved dead, and where there is life there
+is opportunity.  In that grim minute King felt heretical;  but a
+man's feelings are his own affair provided he can prove it, and
+he managed to seem about as much at ease as a native hakim ought
+to feel at such an initiation.
+
+"Come forward!" the mullah howled, and he obeyed, treading gingerly
+between men who were at no pains to let him by, and silently blessing
+them, because he was not really in any hurry at all.  Yasmini looked
+lovely from a distance, and life was sweet.
+
+"Who are his witnesses?"
+
+"Witnesses?" the roof hissed.
+
+"I!" shouted Ismail, jumping up.
+
+"I!" cracked the roof.  "I!  I!"  So that for a second King almost
+believed he had a crowd of men to swear for him and did not hear
+Darya Khan at all, who rose from a place not very far behind where
+had sat.
+
+Ismail followed him in a hurry, like a man wading a river with loose
+clothes gathered in one arm and the other arm ready in case of falling.
+He took much less trouble than King not to tread on people, and oaths'
+marked his wake.
+
+Darya Khan did not go so fast.  As he forced his way forward a man
+passed him up the wooden box that King had used to stand on;  he
+seized it in both hands with a grin and a jest and went to stand
+behind King and Ismail, in line with the lashless mullah, facing
+Yasmini.  Yasmini smiled at them all as if they were actors in her
+comedy, and she well pleased with them.
+
+"Look ye!" howled the mullah.  "Look ye and look well, for this
+is to be one of us!"
+
+King felt ten thousand eyes burn holes in his back, but the one
+pair of eyes that mocked him from the bridge was more disconcerting.
+
+"Turn, Kurram Khan!  Turn that all may see!"
+
+Feeling like a man on a spit, he revolved slowly.  By the time he
+had turned once completely around, besides knowing positively that
+one of the two bracelets on her right arm was the one he had worn,
+or else its exact copy, he knew that he was not meant to die yet;
+for his eyes could work much more swiftly than the horn-rimmed
+spectacles made believe.  He decided that Yasmini meant he should
+be frightened, but not much hurt just yet.
+
+So he ceased altogether to feel frightened and took care to look
+more scared than ever.
+
+"Who paid the price of thy admission?" the mullah howled, and King
+cleared his throat, for he was not quite sure yet what that might mean.
+
+"Speak, Kurram Khan!" Yasmini purred, smiling her loveliest.  "Tell
+them whom you slew."
+
+King turned and faced the crowd, raising himself on the balls of
+his feet to shout, like a man facing thousands of troops on parade.
+He nearly gave himself away, for habit had him unawares.  A native
+hakim, given the stoutest lungs in all India, would not have shouted
+in that way.
+
+"Cappitin Attleystan King!" he roared.  And he nearly jumped out
+of his skin when his own voice came rattling back at him from the
+roof overhead.
+
+"Cappitin Attleystan King!" it answered.
+
+Yasmini chuckled as a little rill will sometimes chuckle among ferns.
+It was devilish.  It seemed to say there were traps not far ahead.
+
+"Where was he slain?" asked the mullah.
+
+"In the Khyber Pass," said King.
+
+"In the Khyber Pass!" the roof whispered hoarsely, as if aghast
+at such cold-bloodedness.
+
+"Now give proof!" said the mullah.  "Words at the gate--proof in
+the cavern!  Without good proof, there is only one way out of here!"
+
+"Proof!" the crowd thundered.  "Proof!"
+
+"Proof!  Proof!  Proof!" the roof echoed.
+
+There was no need for Darya Khan to whisper.  King's hands were
+behind him, and he had seen what he had seen and guessed what he
+had guessed while he was turning to let the crowd look at him.  His
+fingers closed on human hair.
+
+"Nay, it is short!" hissed Darya Khan.  "Take the two ears, or hold
+it by the jawbone!  Hold it high in both hands!"
+
+King obeyed, without looking at the thing, and Ismail, turning to
+face the crowd, rose on tiptoe and filled his lungs for the effort
+of his life.
+
+"The head of Cappitin Attleystan King--infidel kaffir--British
+arrficer!" he howled.
+
+"Good!" the crowd bellowed.  "Good!  Throw it!"
+
+The crowd's roar and the roof's echoes combined until pandemonium.
+
+"Throw it to them, Kurram Khan!" Yasmini purred from the bridge end,
+speaking as softly and as sweetly, as if she coaxed a child.  Yet
+her voice carried.
+
+He lowered the head, but instead of looking at it he looked up at her.
+He thought she was enjoying herself and his predicament as he had
+never seen any one enjoy anything.
+
+"Throw it to them, Kurram Khan!" she purred.  "It is the custom!"
+
+"Throw it!  Throw it!" the crowd thundered.
+ 
+He turned the ghastly thing until it lay face-upward in his hands,
+and so at last he saw it.  He caught his breath, and only the horn-
+rimmed spectacles, that he had cursed twice that night, saved him
+from self-betrayal.  The cavern seemed to sway, but he recovered
+and his wits worked swiftly.  If Yasmini detected his nervousness
+she gave no sign.
+
+"Throw it!  Throw it!  Throw it!"
+
+The crowd was growing impatient.  Many men were standing, waving
+their arms to draw attention to themselves, and he wondered what
+the ultimate end of the head would be, if he obeyed and threw it
+to them.  Watching Yasmini's eyes, he knew it had not entered her
+head that he might disobey.
+
+He looked past her toward the river.  There were no guards near
+enough to prevent what he intended;  but he had to bear in mind
+that the guards had rifles, and if he acted too suddenly one of
+them might shoot at him unbidden.  They were wondrous free with
+their cartridges, those guards, in a land where ammunition is worth
+its weight in silver coin.
+
+Holding the head before him with both hands, he began to walk toward
+the river, edging all the while a little toward the crowd as if
+meaning to get nearer before he threw.
+
+He was much more than half-way to the river's edge before Yasmini
+or anybody else divined his true intention.  The mullah grew suspicions
+first and yelled.  Then King hurried, for he did not believe Yasmini
+would need many seconds in which to regain command of any situation.
+But she saw fit to stand still and watch.
+
+He reached the river and stood there.  Now he was in no hurry at all,
+for it stood to reason that unless Yasmini very much desired him
+to be kept alive he would have been shot dead already.  For a moment
+the crowd was so interested that it forgot to bark and snarl.
+
+His next move was as deliberate as he could make it, although he
+was careful to avoid the least suggestion of mummery (for then the
+crowd would have suspected disloyalty to Islam, and the "Hills"
+are very, very pious, and very suspicious of all foreign ritual).
+
+He did a thoughtful simple thing that made every savage who watched
+him gasp because of its very unexpectedness.  He held the head in
+both hands, threw it far out into the river and stood to watch it sink.
+Then, without visible emotion of any kind, he walked back stolidly to
+face Yasmini at the bridge end, with shoulders a little more stubborn
+now than they ought to be, and chin a shade too high, for there
+never was a man who could act quite perfectly.
+
+"Thou fool!" Yasmini whispered through lips that did not move.
+
+She betrayed a flash of temper like a trapped she-tiger's, but
+followed it instantly with her loveliest smile.  Like to like,
+however, the crowd saw the flash of temper and took its cue from
+that.
+
+"Slay him!" yelled a lone voice, that was greeted an approving murmur.
+
+"Slay him!" advised the roof in a whisper, in one of its phonetic tricks.
+
+"This is a darbar!" Yasmini announced in a rising, ringing voice.
+"My darbar, for I summoned it!  Did I invite any man to speak?"
+
+There was silence, as a whipped unwilling pack is silent.
+
+"Speak, thou, Kurram Khan!" she said.  "Knowing the custom--having
+heard the order to throw that trophy to them--why act otherwise?  Explain!"
+
+Nothing in the wide world could be fairer!  She left him to extricate
+himself from a mess of his own making!  It was more than fair, for
+she went out of her way to offer him an opening to jump through.
+And she paid him the compliment of suggesting be must be clever enough
+to take it, for she seemed to expect a satisfying answer.
+
+"Tell them why!" she said, smiling.  No man could have guessed by
+the tone of her voice whether she was for him or against him, and
+the crowd, beginning again to whisper, watched to see which way
+the cat would jump.
+
+He bowed low to her three times--very low indeed and very slowly,
+for he had to think.  Then he turned his back and repeated the
+obeisance to the crowd.  Still he could think of no excuse, except
+Cocker's Rule No. I for Tight Places, and all the world knows that
+because Solomon said much the same thing first:
+
+"A soft answer is better than a sword!"
+
+But Cocker adds, "Never excuse. Explain!  And blame no man."
+
+"My brothers," he said, and paused, since a man must make a beginning,
+even when he can not see the end.  And as he spoke the answer came
+to him.  He stood upright, and his voice became that of a man whose
+advice has been asked, and who gives it freely.  "These be stirring
+times!  Ye need take care, my brothers!  Ye saw this night how one
+man entered here on the strength of an oath and a promise.  All
+he lacked was proof.  And I had proof.  Ye saw!  Who am I that I
+should deny you a custom?  Yet--think ye, my brothers!--how easy
+would it not have been, had I thrown that head to you, for a traitor
+to catch it and hide it in his clothes, and make away with it!  He
+could have used it to admit to these caves--why--even an Englishman,
+my brothers!  If that had happened, ye would have blamed me!"
+
+Yasmini smiled.  Taking its cue from her, the crowd murmured, scarcely
+assent, but rather recognition of the hakim's adroitness.  The game
+was not won;  there lacked a touch to tip the scales in his favor,
+and Yasmini supplied it with ready genius.
+
+"The hakim speaks truth!" she laughed.
+
+King turned about instantly to face her, but he salaamed so low
+that she could not have seen his expression had she tried.
+
+"If Ye wish it, I will order him tossed into Earth's Drink after
+those other three."
+
+Muhammed Anim rose stroking his beard and rocking where he stood.
+
+"It is the law!" he growled, and King shuddered.
+
+"It is the law," Yasmini answered in a voice that rang with pride
+and insolence, "that none interrupt me while I speak!  For such ill-
+mannered ones Earth's Drink hungers!  Will you test my authority,
+Muhammad Anim?"
+
+The mullah sat down, and hundreds of men laughed at him, but not
+all of the men by any means.
+
+"It is the law that none goes out of Khinjan Cave alive who breaks
+the law of the Caves.  But he broke no very big law.  And he spoke
+truth.  Think Ye! If that head had only fallen into Muhammad Anim's
+lap, the mullah might have smuggled in another man with it!"
+
+A roar of laughter greeted that thrust.  Many men who had not laughed
+at the mullah's first discomfiture, joined in now.  Muhammad Anim
+sat and fidgeted,  meeting nobody's eye and answering nothing.
+ 
+"So it seems to me good," Yasmini said, in a voice that did not
+echo any more but rang very clear and true (she seemed to know the
+trick of the roof, and to use the echo or not as she chose), "to
+let this hakim live!  He shall meditate in his cave a while, and
+perhaps he shall be beaten, lest he dare offend again.  He can no
+more escape from Khinjan Caves than the women who are prisoners here.
+He may therefore live!"
+ 
+There was utter silence.  Men looked at one another and at her,
+and her blazing eyes searched the crowd swiftly.  It was plain
+enough that there were at least two parties there, and that none
+dared oppose Yasmini's will for fear of the others.
+ 
+"To thy seat, Kurram Khan!" she ordered, when she had waited a full
+minute and no man spoke.
+
+He wasted no time.  He hurried out of the arena as fast as he could
+walk, with Ismail and Darya Khan close at his heels.  It was like
+a run out of danger in a dream.  He stumbled over the legs of the
+front-rank men in his hurry to get back to his place, and Ismail
+overtook him, seized him by the shoulders, hugged him, and dragged
+him to the empty seat next to the Orakzai Pathan.  There he hugged
+him until his ribs cracked.
+
+"Ready o' wit!" he crowed.  "Ready o' tongue!  Light o' life!  Man
+after mine own heart!  Hey, I love thee!  Readily I would be thy man,
+but for being hers!  Would I had a son like thee!  Fool--fool--fool
+not to throw the head to them!  Squeamish one!  Man like a child!
+What is the head but earth when the life has left it?  What would
+thy head be without the nimble wit?  Fool--fool--fool!  And clever!
+Turned the joke on Muhammad Anim!  Turned it on Bull-with-a-beard
+in a twinkling--in the bat of an eye--in a breath!  Turned it against
+her enemy and raised a laugh against him from his own men!  Ready
+o' wit!  Shameless one!  Lucky one!  Allah was surely good to thee!"
+
+Still exulting, he let go, but none too soon for comfort.  King's
+ribs were sore from his hugging for days.
+
+"What is it?" he asked.  For King seemed to be shaping words with
+his lips.  He bent a great hairy ear to listen.
+
+"Have they taken Ali Masjid Fort?" King whispered.
+
+"How should I know?  Why?"
+
+"Tell me, man, if you love me!  Have they taken it?"
+
+"Nay, how should I know?  Ask her!   She knows more than any man knows!"
+
+King turned to ask the same question of his friend the Orakzai Pathan;
+but the Pathan would have none of his questions, he was busy listening
+for whispers from the crowd, watching with both eyes, and he shoved
+King aside.
+
+The crowd was very far from being satisfied.  An angry murmur had
+begun to fill the cavern as a hive is filled with the song of bees
+at swarming time.  But even so, surmise what one might, it was not
+easy to persuade the eye that Yasmini's careless smile and easy
+poise were assumed.  If she recognized indignation and feared it,
+she disguised her fear amazingly.
+
+King saw her whisper to a guard.  The fellow nodded and passed his
+shield to another man.  He began to make his way in no great hurry
+toward the edge of the arena.  She whispered again and standing
+forward with their trumpets seven of the guards blew a blast that
+split across the cavern like the trump of doom;  and as its hundred
+thousand echoes died in the roof, the hum of voices died, too, and
+the very sound of breathing.  The gurgling of water became as if
+the river flowed in solitude.
+
+Leisurely then, languidly, she raised both arms until she looked
+like an angel poised for flight.  The little jewels stitched to
+her gauzy dress twinkled like fire-flies as she moved.  The crowd
+gasped sharply.  She had it by the heart-strings.
+
+She called, and four guards got under one shield, bowing their heads
+and resting the great rim on their shoulders.  They carried it
+beneath her and stood still.  With a low delicious laugh, sweet
+and true, she sprang on it, and the shield scarcely trembled;  she
+seemed lighter than the silk her dress was woven from!
+
+They carried her so, looking as if she and the shield were carved
+of a piece, and by a master such as has not often been.  And in
+the midst of the arena before they had ceased moving she began to
+sing, with her head thrown back and bosom swelling like a bird's.
+
+The East would ever rather draw its own conclusions from a hint
+let fall than be puzzled by what the West believes are facts.  And
+parables are not good evidence in courts of law, which is always
+a consideration.  So her song took the form of a parable.
+
+And to say that she took hold of them and played rhapsodies of her
+own making on their heart-strings would be to undervalue what she did.
+They were dumb while she sang, but they rose at her.  Not a force
+in the world could have kept them down, for she was deftly touching
+cords that stirred other forces--subtle, mysterious, mesmeric, which
+the old East understands--which Muhammad the Prophet understood
+when he harnessed evil in the shafts with men and wrote rules for
+their driving in a book.  They rose in silence and stood tense.
+
+While she sang, the guard to whom she had whispered forced a way
+through the ranks of the standing crowd, and came behind Ismail.
+He tweaked the Afridi's ear to draw attention, for like all the
+others--like King, too--Ismail was listening with dropped jaw and
+watching with burning eyes.  For a minute they whispered, so low
+that King did not hear what they said;  and then the guard forced
+his way back by the shortest route to the arena, knocking down half
+a dozen men and gaining safety beyond the lamps before his victims
+could draw knife and follow him.
+
+Yasmini's song went on, verse after verse, telling never one fact,
+yet hinting unutterable things in a language that was made for hint
+and metaphor and parable and innuendo.  What tongue did not hint
+at was conveyed by subtle gesture and a smile and flashing eyes.
+It was perfectly evident that she knew more than King--more than
+the general at Peshawur--more than the viceroy at Simla--probably
+more than the British government--concerning what was about to
+happen in Islam.  The others might guess . She knew.  It was just
+as evident that she would not tell.  The whole of her song, and
+it took her twenty minutes by the count of King's pulse, to sing it,
+was a warning to wait and a promise of amazing things to come.
+
+She sang of a wolf-pack gathering from the valleys in the winter
+snow--a very hungry wolf-pack.  Then of a stalled ox, grown very
+fat from being cared for.  Of the "Heart of the Hills" that awoke
+in the womb of the "Hills," and that listened and watched.
+
+"Now, is she the 'Heart of the Hills'?" King wondered.  The rumors
+men had heard and told again in India, about the "Heart of the Hills"
+in Khinjan seemed to have foundation.
+
+He thought of the strange knife, wrapped in a handkerchief under
+his shirt, with its bronze blade and gold hilt in the shape of a
+woman dancing.  The woman dancing was astonishingly like Yasmini,
+standing on the shield!
+
+She sang about the owners of the stalled ox, who were busy at bay,
+defending themselves and their ox from another wolf-pack in another
+direction "far beyond."
+
+She urged them to wait a little while. The ox was big enough and
+fat enough to nourish all the wolves in the world for many seasons.
+Let them wait, then, until another, greater wolf-pack joined them,
+that they might go hunting all together, overwhelm its present
+owners and devour the ox!  So urged the "Heart of the Hills,"
+speaking to the mountain wolves, according to Yasmini's song.
+
+        "The little cubs in the burrows know.
+        Are ye grown wolves, who hurry so?"
+
+She paused, for effect;  but they gave tongue then because they
+could not help it, and the cavern shook to their terrific worship.
+
+"Allah! Allah!"
+
+They summoned God to come and see the height and depth and weight
+of their allegiance to her!  And because for their thunder there
+was no more chance of being heard, she dropped from the shield like
+a blossom.  No sound of falling could have been heard in all that din,
+but one could see she made no sound.  The shield-bearers ran back
+to the bridge and stood below it, eyes agape.
+
+Rewa Gunga spoke truth in Delhi when he assured King he should some
+day wonder at Yasmini's dancing.
+
+She became joy and bravery and youth!  She danced a story for them
+of the things they knew.  She was the dawn light, touching the
+distant peaks.  She was the wind that follows it, sweeping among
+the junipers and kissing each as she came.  She was laughter, as
+the little children laugh when the cattle are loosed from the byres
+at last to feed in the valleys.  She was the scent of spring uprising.
+She was blossom.  She was fruit!  Very daughter of the sparkle of
+warm sun on snow, she was the "Heart of the Hills" herself!
+
+Never was such dancing!  Never such an audience!  Never such mad
+applause!  She danced until the great rough guards had to run round
+the arena with clubbed butts and beat back trespassers who would
+have mobbed her.  And every movement--every gracious wonder-curve
+and step with which she told her tale was as purely Greek as the
+handle on King's knife and the figures on the lamp-bowls and as
+the bracelets on her arm. Greek!
+
+And she half-modern-Russian, ex-girl-wife of a semi-civilized Hill-
+rajah!  Who taught her?  There is nothing new, even in Khinjan,
+in the "Hills"!
+
+And when the crowd defeated the arena guards at last and burst
+through the swinging butts to seize and fling her high and worship
+her with mad barbaric rite, she ran toward the shield.  The four
+men raised it shoulder-high again.  She went to it like a leaf in
+the wind--sprang on it as if wings had lifted her, scarce touching
+it with naked toes--and leapt to the bridge with a laugh.
+
+She went over the bridge on tiptoes, like nothing else under heaven
+but Yasmini at her bewitchingest.  And without pausing on the far
+side she danced up the hewn stone stairs, dived into the dark hole
+and was gone!
+
+"Come!" yelled Ismail in King's ear.  He could have heard nothing
+less, for the cavern was like to burst apart from the tumult.
+
+"Whither?" the Afridi shouted in disgust. "Does the wind ask whither?
+Come like the wind and see!  They will remember next that they have
+a bone to pick with thee!  Come away!"
+
+That seemed good enough advice.  He followed as fast as Ismail
+could shoulder a way out between the frantic Hillmen, deafened,
+stupefied, numbed, almost cowed by the ovation they were giving
+their "Heart of their Hills."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XII
+
+
+
+A scorpion in a corner stings himself to death.
+A coward blames the gods. They laugh and let him die
+A man goes forward
+--Native Proverb
+
+
+As they disappeared after a scramble through the mouth of the same
+tunnel they had entered by, a roar went up behind them like the
+birth of earthquakes.  Looking back over his shoulder, King saw
+Yasmini come back into the hole's mouth, to stand framed in it and
+bow acknowledgment.  She looked so ravishing in contrast to the
+huge grim wall, and the black river, and the darkness at her back,
+that Khinjan's thousands tried to storm the bridge and drag her
+down to them.  The guards were hard put to it, with their backs
+to the bridge end, for two or three minutes.
+
+But Ismail would not let him wait and watch from there.  He dragged
+him down the tunnel and pushed him up on to a ledge where they
+could both see without being seen, through a fissure in the rock.
+
+For the space of five minutes Yasmini stood in the great hole,
+smiling and watching the struggle below.  Then she went, and the
+guards began to get the best of it, because the crowd's enthusiasm
+waned when they could see her no more.  Then suddenly the guards began
+to loose random volleys at the roof and brought down hundredweights
+of splintered stalactite.
+ 
+Within a minute there were a hundred men busy on sweeping up the
+splinters.  In another minute twenty Zakka Khels had begun a sword
+dance, yelling like the damned.  A hundred joined them.  In three
+minutes more the whole arena was a dinning whirlpool, and the river's
+voice was drowned in shouting and the stamping of naked feet on stone.
+
+"Come!" urged Ismail, and led the way.
+
+King's last impression was of earth's womb on fire and of hellions
+brewing wrath.  The stalactites and the hurrying river multiplied
+the dancing lights into a million, and the great roof hurled the
+din down again to make confusion with the new din coming up.
+
+Ismail went like a rat down a run, and King failed to overtake him
+until he found him in the cave of the slippers kicking to right
+and left at random.
+
+"Choose a good pair!" he growled.  "Let late-comers fight for what
+is left!  Nay, I have thine!  Choose thou the next best!"
+
+The statement being one of fact, and that no time or place for a
+quarrel with the only friend in sight, King picked out the best
+slippers he could see.  The instant he had them on Ismail was off
+again, running like the wind.
+
+They had no torch.  They left the little tunnel lamps behind.  It
+became so dark that King had to follow by ear, and so it happened
+that he missed seeing where the tunnel forked.  He imagined they
+were running back toward the ledge under the waterfall;  yet, when
+Ismail called a halt at last, panting, groped behind a great rock
+for a lamp and lit the wick with a common safety match, they were
+in a cave be had never seen before.
+
+"Where are we?" King asked.
+ 
+"Where none dare seek us."
+
+Ismail held the lamp high, shielding its wick with a hollowed palm
+and peering about him as if in doubt, his ragged beard looking like
+smoke in the wind;  for a wind blew down all the passages in Khinjan.
+
+King examined the lamp.  It was of bronze and almost as surely
+ancient Greek as it surely was not Indian.  There were figures
+graven on the bowl representing a woman dancing, who looked not
+unlike Yasmini;  but before he had time to look very closely Ismail
+blew the lamp out and was off again, like a shadow shot into its
+mother night.
+
+Confused by the sudden darkness King crashed into a rock as he
+tried to follow.  Ismail turned back and gave him the end of a
+cotton girdle that he unwound from his waist;  then he plunged
+ahead again into Cimmerian blackness, down a passage so narrow
+that they could touch a wall with either hand.
+
+Once he shouted back to duck, and they passed tinder a low roof
+where water dripped on them, and the rock underfoot was the bed of
+a shallow stream.  After that the track began to rise, and the grade
+grew so steep that even Ismail, the furious, had to slacken pace.
+
+They began to climb up titanic stairways all in the dark, feeling
+their way through fissures in a mountain's framework, up zigzag
+ledges, and over great broken lumps of rock from one cave to another;
+until at last in one great cave Ismail stopped and relit the lamp.
+Hunting about with its aid he found an imported "hurricane" lantern
+and lit that, leaving the bronze lamp in its place.
+
+Soon after that they lost sight of walls to their left for a time,
+although there were no stars, nor any light to suggest the outer
+world--nothing but wind.  The wind blew a hurricane.
+
+Their path now was a very narrow ledge formed by a crack that ran
+diagonally down the face of a black cliff on their right.  They
+hugged the stone because of a sense of fathomless space above--below--
+on every side but one.  The rock wall was the one thing tangible,
+and the footing the crack in it afforded was the gift of God.
+
+The moaning wind rose to a shriek at intervals and made their clothes
+flutter like ghosts' shrouds, and in spite of it King's shirt was
+drenched with sweat, and his fingers ached from clinging as if they
+were on fire.  Crawling against the wind along a wider ledge at
+the top, they came to a chasm, crossed by a foot-wide causeway.
+The wind bowled and moaned in it, and the futile lantern rays only
+suggested unimaginable, things--death the least of them.
+
+"Art thou afraid?" asked Ismail, holding the lantern to King's face.
+
+"Kuch dar nahin hai!" he answered. "There is no such thing as fear!"
+
+It was a bold answer, and Ismail laughed, knowing well that neither
+of them believed a word of it at that moment.  Only, each thought
+better of the other, that the one should have cared to ask, and
+that the other should be willing to give the lie to a fear that
+crawled and could be felt.  Too many men are willing to admit they
+are afraid.  Too many would rather condemn and despise than ask
+and laugh.  But it is on the edges of eternity that men find each
+other out, and sympathize.
+
+Ismail went down on his hands and knees, lifting the lantern along
+a foot at a time in front of him and carrying it in his teeth by
+the bail the last part of the way.  It seemed like an hour before
+he stood up, nearly a hundred yards away on the far side, and yelled
+for King to follow.
+
+The wind snatched the yells away, but the waving lantern beckoned him,
+and King knelt down in the dark.  It happened that he laid his hand
+on a loose stone, the size of his head, near the edge.  He shoved
+it over and listened. He listened for a minute but did not hear it
+strike anything, and the shudder, that he could not repress, came
+from the middle of his backbone and spread outward through each
+fiber of his being.  If he had delayed another second his courage
+would have failed;  he began at once to crawl to where Ismail stood
+swinging the light.
+
+There was room on the ledge for his knees and no more.  Toes and
+fingers were overside. He sat down as on horseback, and transferred
+both slippers to his pockets, and then went forward again with
+bare feet, waiting whenever the wind snatched at him with redoubled
+fury, to lean against it and grip the rock with numb fingers.  Ismail
+swung the lamp, for reasons best known to himself, and half-way
+over King sat astride the ridge again to shout to him to hold it
+still. But Ismail did not understand him.
+
+"Khinjan graves are deep!" be howled back. "Fear and the shadow
+of death are one!"
+
+He swung the lamp even more violently, as if it were a charm that
+could exorcise fear and bring a man over safely.  The shadows danced
+until his brain reeled, and King swore be would thrash the fool
+as soon as be could reach him.  He lay belly-downward on the rock
+and crawled like an insect the remainder of the way.
+
+And as if aware of his intention Ismail started to hurry on while
+there was yet a yard or two to crawl, and anger not being a load
+worth carrying, nor revenge a thing permitted to interfere with
+the sirkar's business, King let both die.
+
+Hunted by the wind, they ran round a bold shoulder of cliff into
+another black-dark tunnel.  There the wind died, swallowed in a
+hundred fissures, but the track grew worse and steeper until they
+had to cling with both hands and climb and now and then Ismail set
+the lantern on a ledge and lowered his girdle to help King up.
+Sometimes he stood on King's shoulder in order to reach a higher
+level.  They climbed for an hour and dropped at last panting, on
+a ledge, after squeezing themselves under the corner of a boulder.
+
+The lantern light shone on a tiny trickle of cold water, and there
+Ismail drank deep, like a bull, before signing to King to imitate him.
+
+"A thirsty throat and a crazy head are one he counseled.  "A man
+needs wit and a wet tongue who would talk with her!"
+
+"Where is she?" asked King, when he had finished drinking.
+
+"Go and look!"
+
+Ismail gave him a sudden shove, that sent him feet first forward
+over the edge.  He fell a distance rather greater than his own height,
+to another ledge and stood there looking up.  He could see Ismail's
+red-rimmed eyes blinking down at him in the lantern light, but
+suddenly the Afridi blew the lamp out, and then the darkness became
+solid.  Thought itself left off less than a yard away.
+
+"Ismail!" he whispered.  But Ismail did not answer him.
+
+He faced about, leaning against the rock, with the flat of both
+bands pressed tight against it for the sake of its company;  and
+almost at once he saw a little bright red light glowing in the
+distance.  It might have been a hundred yards, and it might have
+been a mile away below him;  it was perfectly impossible to judge,
+for the darkness was not measurable.
+
+"Flowers turn to the light!" droned Ismail's voice above sententiously,
+and turning, he thought he could see red eyes peering over the rock.
+He jumped, and made a grab for the flowing beard that surely must
+be below them, but he missed.
+
+"Little fish swim to the light!" droned Ismail.  "Moths fly to the
+light!  Who is a man that he should know less than they?"
+
+He turned again and stared at the light.  Dimly, very vaguely be
+could make out that a causeway led downward from almost where he
+stood.  He was convinced that should he try to climb back Ismail
+would merely reach out a hand and shove him down again, and there
+was no sense in being put to that indignity.  He decided to go
+forward, for there was even less sense in standing still.
+
+"Come with me!  Come along, Ismail!" he called.
+
+"Allah!  Hear him!  Nay, nay, nay!  Who was it said a little while
+ago, 'There is no such thing as fear!'  I am afraid, but thou and
+I are two men!  Go thou alone!"
+
+Reason is a man's only dependable faculty.   Reason told him that
+at a word from Yasmini he would have been flung into "Earth's Drink"
+hours ago.  Therefore, added reason, why should she forego that
+spectacular opportunity when his death would have amused Khinjan's
+thousands, only to kill him now in the dark alone?  He had treated
+a few dozen sick men, surely she had not been afraid to offend them.
+Had she not dared forbid the sick coming to him altogether?  "Forward!"
+says Cocker, in at least a dozen places.  "Go forward and find out!
+Better a bed in hell than a seat on the horns of a dilemma!  Forward!"
+
+There was no sound now anywhere.  He stretched a leg downward and
+felt a rock two or three feet lower down, and the sound of his slipper
+sole touching it, being the only noise, made the short hair rise
+on the back of his neck.  Then he took himself, so to speak, by
+the hand and went forward and downward, for action is the only curb
+imagination knows.
+
+He forgot to count his pulse and judge how long it took him to
+descend that causeway in the dark.  It was not so very rough, nor
+so very dangerous, but of course he only knew that fact afterward.
+He had to grope his way inch by inch, trusting to sense of touch
+and the British army's everlasting luck, with an eye all the while
+on a red light that was something like the glow through hell's keyhole.
+
+When he reached bottom, after perhaps twenty minutes, and stood
+at last on comparatively level rock, his legs were trembling from
+tension, and he had to sit down while he stretched them out and
+rested.  The light still looked a quarter of a mile away, although
+that was guesswork.  It made scarcely more impression on the
+surrounding darkness than one coal glowing in a cellar.  The silence
+began to make his head ache.
+
+He got up and started forward, but just as he did that he thought
+he heard a footstep.  He suspected Ismail might be following after all.
+
+"Ismail!" he called, trying to peer through the dark.
+ 
+But all the darkness had its home there.  He could not even see
+his own hand stretched out.  His own voice made him jump;  after
+a second's pause it began to crack and rattle from wall to wall
+and from roof to floor, until at last the echoing word became one
+again and died with a hiss somewhere in the bowels of the world--
+Mbisssss!--like the sound of hot iron being plunged into a blacksmith's
+trough with a little after-murmur of complaining water.
+
+But then he was sure he heard a footstep!  He faced about;  and
+now there were two red lights where there had been only one.  They
+seemed rather nearer, perhaps because there were two of them.
+
+"Hullo, King sahib!" said a voice he recognized;  and he choked.
+He felt that if he had coughed his heart would have lain on the floor!
+
+"Are you afraid, King sahib?" said the Rangar Rewa Gunga's voice,
+and he took a step forward to be closer to his questioner.  He
+found himself beside a rock, looking up at the Rangar's turban,
+that peered over the top of it.  He could dimly make out the Rangar's
+dark eyes.
+
+"I would be afraid if I were you!"
+
+Rewa Gunga flashed a little electric torch into his eyes, but after
+a few seconds he shifted it so that both their faces could be seen,
+although the Rangar's only very faintly.
+
+"I have come to warn you!"
+
+"Very good of you, I'm sure!" said King.
+
+"If she knew I were here, she would jolly well have my liver nailed
+to a wall!  I come to advise you to go back!"
+
+Have they taken Ali Masjid Fort?" King asked him.
+
+"Never mind, sahib, but listen!  I have brought her bracelet!  I
+stole it!  She stole it from you, and I stole it back!  Take it!
+Put it on and wear it!  Use it as a passport out of Khinjan Caves--
+for no man dare touch you while you wear it--and as a passport down
+the Khyber into India!  Go back to India and stay there!  Take it
+and go!  Quick!  Take it!"
+
+"No, thanks!" said King.
+
+The Rangar laughed mirthlessly, shifting the light a little as King
+stepped aside to get a better view of him.  He held the torch more
+cunningly than a Spanish lady holds a fan.
+
+"All Englishmen are fools--most of them stiff-necked fools," he
+asserted.  "Bah!  Do you think I do not know?  Do you think anything
+is hidden from her?  I know--and she knows--that you think you have
+a surprise in store for her!  You think you will go to her, and
+she will say, 'King sahib, why did you throw that head into the river,
+and put me in danger from my men?'  And you will say, will you not,
+'Princess, that was my brother's head!'?  Was that not what you
+intended?  Is it not true?  Does she not know it?  She knows more
+than you know, King sahib!  Because you showed me certain little
+courtesies, I have come to warn you to run away!"
+
+"Do you suppose she knows you are here?" King asked, and the Rangar
+laughed.
+
+"If she knows so much, and is able to read my mind from a distance,
+where does she suppose you are?" King insisted.
+
+The Rangar laughed again, leaning his chin on both fists and switching
+out the light.
+
+"Perhaps she sent me to warn you!"
+
+"Well," said King, "my brother commanded at Ali Masjid Fort.  There
+are things I must ask her.  How did she know that head was my
+brother's? What part had she in taking it from his shoulders?  What
+did she mean by that song of hers?"
+
+The Rangar chuckled softly.
+
+"There are no fools in the world like Englishmen!  Listen!  You
+are being offered life and liberty!  Here is the key to both!"
+
+He made the gold bracelet ring on the rock by way of explanation.
+
+"Take the key and go!"
+
+"No!" said King.
+
+"Very well, sahib!  Hear the other side of it!  Beyond those two
+red lights there is a curtain.  This side of that curtain you are
+Athelstan King of the Khyber Rifles, or Kurram Khan, or whatever
+you care to call yourself.  Beyond it, you are what she calls
+you! Choose!"
+
+King did not answer, so he continued after a pause.
+
+"You shall pass behind that curtain, if you insist.  Beyond it you
+shall know what she knows about Ali Masjid and your brother's head!
+You shall know all that she knows!  There shall be no secrets
+between you and her!  She shall translate the meaning of her song
+to you!  But you shall never come out again King of the Khyber Rifles,
+or Kurram Khan!  If you ever come out again, it shall be as you
+never dreamed, bearing arms you never saw yet, and you shall cut
+with your own hand the ties that bind you to England! Choose!"
+
+"I chose long ago," said King.
+
+"Are the gentle English never serious?" the Rangar asked.  "Will
+you not understand that if you pass that curtain you shall know
+all things that Yasmini knows, but that you shall cease to be
+yourself?  Cease--to--be--yourself!  Is my meaning clear?"
+
+"Not in the least," said King, "but I hope mine is!"
+
+"You will go forward?"
+
+"Yes," said King.
+
+Rewa Gunga made no answer to that, although King waited for an answer.
+For about a minute there was no sound at all, except the beating
+of King's heart. Then he moved to try and see the Rangar's turban
+above the rock.  He could not see it.  He found a niche in the rock,
+set his foot in it and mounted three or four feet, until his head
+was level with the top.  The Rangar was gone!
+
+He listened for two or three minutes, but the silence began to make
+his head ache again;  so he stooped to feel the floor with his hand
+before deciding to go forward.  There was no mistaking the finish
+given by the tread of countless feet.  He was on a highway, and
+there are not often pitfalls where so many feet have been.
+
+For all that be went forward as a certain Agag once did, and it
+was many minutes before he could see a curtain glowing blood-red
+in the light behind the two lamps, at the top of a flight of ten
+stone steps.  It was peculiar to him and to his service that he
+counted the steps before going nearer.
+
+When he went quite close he saw carpet down the middle of the steps,
+so ancient that the stone showed through in places;  all the pattern,
+supposing it ever had any, was worn or faded away.  Carpet and steps
+glowed red too.  His own face, and the hands he held in front of
+him were red-hot-poker color.  Yet outside the little ellipse of
+light the darkness looked like a thing to lean against, and the
+silence was so intense that he could hear the arteries singing by
+his ears.
+
+He saw the curtains move slightly, apparently in a little puff of
+wind that made the lamps waver.  He was very nearly sure he heard
+a footfall beyond the curtains and a tinkle--as of a tiny silver bell,
+or a jewel striking against another one.
+
+He kicked his slippers off, because there are no conditions under
+which bad manners ever are good policy.  Wide history and Cocker's
+famous code.  Then he walked up the steps without treading on the
+carpet, because living scorpions have been known to be placed under
+carpets on purpose on occasion.  And at the top, being a Secret
+Service man, he stooped to examine the lamps.
+
+They were bronze, cast, polished and graved.  All round the
+circumference of each bowl were figures in half-relief, representing
+a woman dancing.  She was the woman of the knife-hilt, and of the
+lamps in the arena!  She looked like Yasmini!  Only she could not
+be Yasmini because these lamps were so ancient and so rare that
+he had never seen any in the least like them, although he had visited
+most of the museums of the East.
+
+Both lamps were alike, for he crossed over to make sure and took
+each in his hands in turn.  But no two figures of the dance were
+alike on either.  It was the same woman dancing, but the artist
+had chosen twenty different poses with which to immortalize his
+skill, and hers.  Both lamps burned sweet oil with a wick, and each
+had a chimney of horn, not at all unlike a modern lamp-chimney.  The
+horn was stained red.
+
+As he set the second lamp down he became aware of a subtle interesting
+smell, and memory took back at once to Yasmini's room in the Chandni
+Chowk in Delhi where he had smelled it first.  It was the peculiar
+scent he had been told was Yasmini's own--a blend of scents, like
+a chord of music, in which musk did not predominate.
+
+He took three strides and touched the curtains, discovering now
+for the first time that there were two of them, divided down the
+middle.  They were about eight feet high, and each three feet wide,
+of leather, and though they looked old as the "Hills" themselves
+the leather was supple as good cloth.  They had once been decorated
+with figures in gold leaf, but only a little patch of yellow here
+and there remained to hint at faded glories.
+ 
+He decided to remember his manners again, and at least to make
+opportunity for an invitation.
+
+"Kurram Khan hai!" he announced, forgetting the echo.  But the
+echo was the only answer.  It cackled at him, cracking back and
+forth down the cavern to die with a groan in illimitable darkness.
+
+"Kurram-urram-urram-urram-urram-ahn-hai!  Urram-urram-urram-urram-
+ahn-hai!  Urram-urram-urram-ah-hh-ough-ah!"
+
+There was no sound beyond the curtains.  No answer.  Only he thought
+the strange scent grew stronger.  He decided to go forward.  With
+his heart in his mouth he parted the curtains with both hands,
+startled by the sharp jangle of metal rings on a rod.
+
+So he stood, with arms outstretched, staring--staring--staring--
+with eyes skilled swiftly to take in details, but with a brain that
+tried to explain--formed a hundred wild suggestions--and then reeled.
+He was face to face with the unexplainable--the riddle of Khinjan Caves.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIII
+
+
+
+Grand was thy goal! Thy vision new!
+        Ave, Caesar!
+Conquest?  Ends of Earth thy view?
+        Ave, Caesar!
+To sow--to reap--to play God's game?
+How many Caesars did that same
+Until the great, grim Reaper came!
+Who ploughs with death shall garner rue,
+And under all skies is nothing new.
+        Vale, Caesar!
+
+
+Telling the story afterward King never made any effort to describe
+his own sensations.  It was surely enough to state what be saw,
+after a breathless climb among the rat-runs of a mountain with his
+imagination fired already by what had happened in the Cavern of
+Earth's Drink.
+
+The leather curtains slipped through his fingers and closed behind
+him with the clash of rings on a rod.  But he was beyond being
+startled.  He was not really sure he was in the world.  He knew
+he was awake, and he knew he was glad he had left his shoes outside.
+But he was not certain whether it was the twentieth century, or
+fifty-five B. C., or earlier yet;  or whether time had ceased.  Very
+vividly in that minute there flashed before his mind Mark Twain's
+suggestion of the Transposition of Epochs.
+
+The place where he was did not look like a cave, but a palace
+chamber, for the rock walls had been trimmed square and polished
+smooth;  then they had been painted pure white, except for a wide
+blue frieze, with a line of gold-leaf drawn underneath it.  And
+on the frieze, done in gold-leaf too, was the Grecian lady of the
+lamps, always dancing.  There were fifty or sixty figures of her,
+no two the same.
+
+A dozen lamps were burning, set in niches cut in the walls at
+measured intervals.  They were exactly like the two outside, except
+that their horn chimneys were stained yellow instead of red, suffusing
+everything in a golden glow.
+
+Opposite him was a curtain, rather like that through which he had
+entered.  Near to the curtain was a bed, whose great wooden posts
+were cracked with age.  And it was at the bed he stared, with eyes
+that took in every detail but refused to believe.
+
+In spite of its age it was spread with fine new linen.  Richly
+embroidered, not very ancient Indian draperies hung down from it
+to the floor on either side.  On it, above the linen, a man and a
+woman lay hand-in-hand;  and the woman was so exactly like Yasmini,
+even to her clothing, and her naked feet, that it was not possible
+for a man to be self-possessed.
+
+They both seemed asleep.  It was as if Yasmini, weary from the
+dancing, had laid herself to sleep beside her lord.  But who was he?
+And why did he wear Roman armor?  And why was there no guard to
+keep intruders out?
+
+It was minutes before he satisfied himself that the man's breast
+did not rise and fall under the bronze armor and that the woman's
+jeweled gauzy stuff was still.  Imagination played such tricks with
+him that in the stillness he imagined he heard breathing.
+
+After be was sure they were both dead, be went nearer, but it was
+a minute yet before he knew the woman was not she.  At first a
+wild thought possessed him that she had killed herself.
+
+The only thing to show who he had been were the letters S. P. Q. R.
+on a great plumed helmet, on a little table by the bed.  But she
+was the woman of the lamp-bowls and the frieze.  A life-size stone
+statue in a corner was so like her, and like Yasmini too, that it
+was difficult to decide which of the two it represented.
+
+She had lived when he did, for her fingers were locked in his.  And
+he had lived two thousand years ago, because his armor was about
+as old as that, and for proof that be had died in it part of his
+breast had turned to powder inside the breastplate.  The rest of
+his body was whole and perfectly preserved.
+
+Stern, handsome in a high-beaked Roman way, gray on the temples,
+firm-lipped, he lay like an emperor in harness.  But the pride and
+resolution on his face were outdone by the serenity of hers.  Very
+surely those two had been lovers.
+
+Something--he could not decide what--about the man's appearance
+kept him staring for ten minutes, holding his breath unconsciously
+and letting it out in little silent gasps.  It annoyed him that
+he could not pin down the elusive thing;  and when be went on
+presently to be curious about more tangible things, it was only
+to be faced with the unexplainable at every turn.
+
+How had the bodies been preserved, for instance?  They were perfect,
+except for that one detail of the man's breast.  The air was full
+of the perfume he had learned to recognize as Yasmini's, but there
+was no sniff about the bodies of pitch or bitumen, or of any other
+chemical.  Nor was there any sign of violence about them, or means
+of telling how they died, or when, except for the probable date
+of the man's armor.
+ 
+Both of them looked young and healthy--the woman younger than thirty--
+twenty-five at a guess--and the man perhaps forty, perhaps forty-five.
+
+He bent over them.  Every stitch of the man's clothing had decayed
+in the course of centuries, so that his armor rested on the naked skin,
+except for a dressed leather kilt about his middle.  The leather was
+as old as the curtains at the entrance, and as well preserved.
+
+But the woman's silken clothing was as new as the bedding;  and
+that was so new that it had been woven in Belfast, Ireland, by
+machinery and bore the mark of the firm that made it!
+
+Yet, they both died at about the same time, or how could their
+fingers have been interlaced?  And some of the jewelry on the
+woman's clothes was very ancient as well as priceless.
+
+He looked closer at the fingers for signs of force and suddenly
+caught his breath.  Under the woman's flimsy sleeve was a wrought
+gold bracelet, smaller than that one he himself had worn in Delhi
+and up the Khyber--exactly like the little one that Yasmini wore
+on her wrist in the Cavern of Earth's Drink!  He raised the loose
+sleeve to look more closely at it.
+
+The sleeve overlay the man's forearm, and the movement laid bare
+another bracelet, on the man's right wrist.  Size for size, this
+was the same as the one that had been stolen from himself.
+
+Memory prompted him.  He felt its outer edge with a finger-nail.
+There was the little nick that he had made in the soft gold when
+he struck it against the cell bars in the jail at the Mir Khan Palace!
+
+That put another thought in his head.  It was less than two hours
+since Yasmini danced in the arena.  It might well be much less
+than that since she had taken off her bracelets.  He laid a finger
+on the dead man's stone-cold hand and let it rest so for a minute.
+Then, running it slowly up the wrist, he touched the gold.  It was
+warm.  He repeated the test on the woman's wrist.  Hers was warm,
+too.  Both bracelets had been worn by a living being within an hour--
+
+"Probably within minutes!"
+
+He muttered and frowned in thought, and then suddenly jumped backward.
+The leather curtain near the bed had moved on its bronze rod.
+
+"Aren't they dears?" a voice said in English behind him.  "Aren't
+they sweet?"
+
+He had jumped so as to face about, and somebody laughed at him.
+Yasmini stood not two arms' lengths away, lovelier than the dead
+woman because of the merry life in her, young and warm, aglow, but
+looking like the dead woman and the woman of the frieze--the woman
+of the lamp--bowls--the statue--come to life, speaking to him in
+English more sweetly than if it had been her mother tongue.  The
+English abuse their language.  Yasmini caressed it and made it do
+its work twice over.
+
+Being dressed as a native, he salaamed low.  Knowing him for what
+he was, she gave him the senna-stained tips of her warm fingers to kiss,
+and he thought she trembled when he touched them.  But a second later
+she had snatched them away and was treating him to raillery.
+
+"Man of pills and blisters!" she said, "tell me how those bodies
+are preserved!  Spill knowledge from that learned skull of thine!"
+
+He did not answer.  He never shone in conversation at any time,
+having made as many friends as enemies by saying nothing until the
+spirit moves him.  But she did not know that yet.
+
+"If I knew for certain why those two did not turn to worms," she
+went on, "almost I would choose to die now, while I am beautiful!
+Think of the fogy museum men!  (She called them by a far less
+edifying name, really, for the East is frank in that way, especially
+in its use of other tongues.)  "What would they say, think you,
+King sahib, if they found us two dead beside those two?  Would not
+that be a mystery?  Don't you love mysteries?  Speak, man, speak!
+Has Khinjan struck you dumb?"
+
+But he did not speak.  He was staring at her arm, where two whitish
+marks on the skin betrayed that bracelets had been.
+
+"Oh, those!  They are theirs.  I would not rob the dead, or the
+gods would turn on me.  I robbed you, instead, while you slept.
+Fie, King sahib, while you slept!"
+
+But her steel did not strike on flint.  It was her eyes that flashed.
+He would have done better to have seemed ashamed, for then he might
+have fooled her, at least for a while.  But having judged himself,
+he did not care a fig for her judgment of him.  She realized that
+instantly and having found a tool that would not work, discarded
+it for a better one.  She grew confidential.
+
+"I borrow them," she explained, "but I put them back.  I take them
+for so many days, and when the day comes--the gods like us to be exact!
+Once there was an Englishman to whom I lent the larger one, and he
+refused to return it.  He wanted it to wear, to bring him luck.
+Collins, of the Gurkhas.  A cobra bit him."
+
+King's eyes changed, for Collins of the Gurkhas had died in his
+two arms, saying never a word.  He had always wondered why the
+native who ran in to kill the cobra had run away again and left
+Collins lying there after seeming to shake hands with him.  Yasmini,
+watching his eyes and reading his memory, missed nothing.
+
+"You saw?" she said excitedly.  "You remember?  Then you understand!
+You yourself were near death when I took the bracelet last night.
+The time was up.  I would have stabbed you if you had tried to
+prevent me!"
+
+Now he spoke at last and gave her a first glimpse of an angle of
+his mind she had not suspected.
+
+"Princess," he said.  He used the word with the deference some men
+can combine with effrontery, so that very tenderness has barbs.
+"You might have had that thing back if you had sent a messenger
+for it at any time.  A word by a servant would have been enough.
+
+"You could never have reached Khinjan then!" she retorted.  Her
+eyes flashed again, but his did not waver.
+
+"Princess," he said, "why speak of what you don't know?"
+
+He thought she would strike like a snake, but she smiled at him
+instead.  And when Yasmini has smiled on a man he has never been
+just the same man afterward.  He knows more, for one thing.  He
+has had a lesson in one of the finer arts.
+
+"I will speak of what I do know," she said.  "No, there is no need.
+Look!  Look!"
+
+She pointed at the bed--at the man on the bed--fingers locked in
+those of a woman who looked so like herself.
+
+"You see--yet you do not see!  Men are blind!  Men look into a mirror,
+and see only whiskers they forgot to shave the day before.  Women
+look once and then remember!  Look again!"
+
+He looked, knowing well there was something to be understood, that
+stared him in the face.  But for the life of him he could not
+determine question or answer.
+
+"What is in your bosom?" she asked him.
+
+He put his band to his shirt.
+
+"Draw it out!" she said, as a teacher drills a child.
+
+He drew out the gold-hilted knife with the bronze blade, with which
+a man had meant to murder him.  He let it lie on the palm of his
+hand and looked from it to her and back again.  The hilt might have
+been a portrait of her modeled from the life.
+
+"Here is another like it," she said, stepping to the bedside.  She
+drew back the woman's dress at the bosom and showed a knife exactly
+like that in King's hand.  "One lay on her bosom and one on his
+when I found them!" she said.  "Now, think again!"
+
+He did think, of thirty thousand possibilities, and of one impossible
+idea that stood up prominent among them all and insisted on seeming
+the only likely one.
+
+"I saw the knife in your bosom last night," she said, "and laughed
+so that I nearly wakened you.  Man!  Are you stupid?  Will that
+ready wit of yours not work?  Have I bewildered you?  Is it my
+perfume?  My eyes?  My jewels?  What is it?  Think, man!  Think!"
+
+But if she wanted to make him guess aloud for her amusement she
+was wasting time.  Had he known the answer he would have held his
+tongue.  As he did not know it, he had all the more reason to wait
+indefinitely, if need be.  But interminable waiting was no part
+of her plan.  Words were welling out of her.
+
+"I gave a fool that knife to use, because he was afraid.  It gave
+him courage.  When he failed I knew it by telegram, and I sent
+another fool before the wires were cold, to kill him in the police-
+station cell for having failed.  One fool has been stabbed and the
+English will hang the other.  Then I sent twenty men to turn India
+inside out and find the knife again, for like the bracelets it has
+its place.  And that is why I laughed.  They are hunting.  They
+will hunt until I call them off!"
+
+"Why didn't you take it with the bracelet?" King asked her, holding
+it out.  "Take it now.  I don't want it."
+
+She accepted it and laid it on the man's bronze armor.  Then, however,
+she resumed it and played with it.
+
+"Look again!" she said.  "Think and look again!"
+
+He looked, and he knew now.  But he still preferred that she should
+tell him, and his lips shut tight.
+
+"Why, having ordered your death, did I countermand the order when
+your life had been attempted once?  Why, as soon as Rewa Gunga had
+seen you, did I order you to be aided in every way?"
+
+Still he did not answer, although the solution to that riddle, too,
+was beginning to dawn on his consciousness.  He suspected she would
+be annoyed if he deprived her of the fun of telling him, so that
+by being silent he played both her game and his own.
+
+"Why did I order your death in the first place?"
+
+The answer to that was obvious, but she answered it for him.
+
+"Because, since the sirkar insisted that one man must come with me
+to Khinjan, I preferred a fool, who could be lost on the way.  I
+knew your reputation.  I never heard any man call you a fool."
+
+She laughed.  He nodded.  She was obviously telling truth.
+
+"Can you guess why I changed my mind about you--wise man?"
+
+She looked from him to the man on the bed and back to him again.
+Having solved her riddle, King had leisure to be interested in her
+eyes, and watched them analytically, like a jeweler appraising
+diamonds.  They were strangely reminiscent, but much more changeable
+and colorful than any he had ever seen.  They had the baffling
+trick of changing while he watched them.
+
+"Having sent a man to kill you, why did I cease to want you killed?
+Instead of losing you on the way to Khinjan, why did I run risks
+to protect you after you reached here?  Why did I save your life
+in the Cavern of Earth's Drink to-night?  You do not know yet?  Then
+I will tell you something else you do not know.  I was in Delhi
+when you were!  I watched and listened while you and Rewa Gunga
+talked in my house!  I was in Rewa Gunga's carriage on the train
+that he took and you did not!  I have learned at first hand that
+you are not a fool.  But that was not enough!  You had to be three
+things--clever and brave and one other.  The one other you are!
+Brave you have proved yourself to be!  Clever you must be, to trick
+your way into Khinjan Caves, even with Ismail at your elbow!  That
+is why I saved your life--because you are those two things and--and--
+one other!"
+
+She snatched a mirror from a little ivory table--a modern mirror--
+bad glass, bad art, bad workmanship, but silver warranted.
+
+"Look in it and then at him!" she ordered.
+
+But he did not need to look.  The man on the bed was not so much
+like himself as the woman was like her, but the resemblance seemed
+to grow under his eyes, as such things do.  It was helped out by
+the stain his brother had applied to his face in the Khyber.  King
+was the taller and the younger by several years, but the noses were
+the same, and the wrinkled fore-heads;  both men had the same firm
+mouth;  both looked like Romans.
+
+"How did you get that scar?"
+
+She came closer and took his hand, holding it in both hers, and
+he felt the same thrill Samson knew.  He steeled himself as Samson
+did not.
+
+"A Mahsudi got me with a martini at long range in the blockade of
+1902," he said dryly.
+
+"Look! Did he get his from a spear or from an arrow?"
+
+Almost in the same spot, also on the dead man's left hand, was a
+scar so nearly like it that it needed a third and a fourth glance
+to tell the difference.  They both bent over the bed to see it,
+and she laid a hand on his shoulder.  Touch and scent and confidence,
+all three were bewitching;  all three were calculated, too!  He
+could have killed her, and she knew he could have killed her, just
+as she knew he would not.  Yet what right had she to know it!
+
+"Athelstan!"
+
+She pronounced his given name as if she loved the word, standing
+straight again and looking into his eyes.  There were high lights
+in hers that outgleamed the diamonds on her dress.
+ 
+"Your gods and mine have done this, Athelstan.  When the gods combine
+they lay plans well indeed!"
+
+"I only know one God," he answered simply, as a man speaks of the
+deep things in his heart.
+
+"I know of many!  They love me!  They shall love you, too!  Many
+are better than one!  You shall learn to know my gods, for we are
+to be partners, you and I!"
+
+She laughed at him, looking like a goddess herself, but he frowned.
+And the more he frowned the better she seemed to like him.
+
+"Partners in what, Princess?"
+
+"Thou--Ismail dubbed thee Ready o' wit!--answer thine own question!"
+
+She took his hand again, her eyes burning with excitement and
+mysticism and ambition like a fever.  She seemed to take more than
+physical possession of him.
+
+"What brought them here?  Tell me that!" she demanded, pointing
+to the bed.  "You think he brought, her?  I tell you she was the
+spur that drove him!  Is it a wonder that men called her the 'Heart
+of the Hills'?  I found them ten years ago and clothed her and put
+new linen on their bed, for the old was all rags and dust.  There
+have always been hundreds--and sometimes thousands--who knew the
+secret of Khinjan Caves, but this has been a secret within a secret.
+Some one, who knew the secret before I, sawed those bracelets through
+and fitted hinges and clasps.  The men you saw in the Cavern of
+Earth's Drink have no doubt I am the 'Heart of the Hills' come to
+life!  They shall know thee as Him within a little while!"
+ 
+She held his hand a little tighter and pressed closer to him, laughing
+softly.  He stood as if made of iron, and that only made her laugh
+the more.
+
+"Tales of the 'Heart of the Hills' have puzzled the Raj, haven't
+they, these many years?  They sent me to find the source of them.
+Me!  They chose well!  There are not many like me!  I have found
+this one dead woman who was like me.  And in ten years, until you
+came, I have found no man like Him!"
+
+She tried to look into his eyes, but he frowned straight in front
+of him.  His native costume and Rangar turban did not make him seem
+any less a man.  His jowl, that was beginning to need shaving, was
+as grim and as satisfying as the dead Roman's.  She stroked his
+left hand with soft fingers.
+
+"I used to think I knew how to dance!" she laughed--"For ten years
+I have taken those pictures of her for my model and have striven
+to learn what she knew.  I have surpassed her!  I used to think I
+knew how to amuse myself with men's dreams--until I found this!
+Then I dreamed on my own account!  My dream was true, my warrior!
+You have come!  Our hour has come!"
+
+She tugged at his hand.  He was hers, soul and harness, if outward
+signs could prove it.
+
+"Come!" she said.  "Is this my hospitality?  You are weary and
+hungry.  Come!"
+
+She led him by the hand, for it would have needed brute force to
+pry her fingers loose.  She drew aside the leather curtain that
+hung on a bronze rod near the bed, led him through it, and let it
+clash to again behind them.
+
+Now they were in the dark together, and it was not comprehended
+in her scheme of things to let circumstance lie fallow.  She pressed
+his hand, and sighed, and then hurried, whispering tender words
+he could scarcely catch.  When they burst together through a curtain
+at the other end of a passage in the rock, his skin was red under
+the tan and for the first time her eyes refused to meet his.
+
+"Why did they choose that cave to sleep in?" she asked him.  "Is
+not this a better one?  Who laid them there?"
+
+He stared about.  They were in a great room far more splendid than
+the first.  There was a fountain in the center splashing in the
+midst of flowers.  They were cut flowers.  The "Hills" must have
+been scoured for them within a day.
+
+There were great cushioned couches all about and two thrones made
+of ivory and gold.  Between two couches was a table, laden with
+golden plates and a golden jug, on pure white linen.  There were
+two goblets of beaten gold and knives with golden handles and bronze
+blades.  The whole room seemed to be drenched in the scent Yasmini
+favored, and there was the same frieze running round all four walls,
+with the woman depicted on it dancing.
+
+"Come, we shall eat!" she said, leading him by the hand to a couch.
+She took the one facing him, and they lay like two Romans of the
+Empire with the table in between.
+
+She struck a golden gong then, and a native woman came in who stared
+at King as if she had seen him before and did not like him.  Except
+for the jewels, she was dressed exactly like Yasmini, which is to
+say that her gauzy stuff was all but transparent.  But Yasmini uses
+raiment as she does her eyes;  it is part of her, and of her art.
+The maid, who would have shone among many women, looked stiff and
+dull by contrast.
+
+"I trust no Hill woman--they are cattle with human tongues," Yasmini
+said, frowning at the maid.  "Even in Delhi there was only this
+one woman whom I dared bring here with me.  You brought my men-
+servants!  They are loyal, but as clumsy as the bears in their
+cold 'Hills'!  Rewa Gunga brought me this one disguised as a man--
+you remember?"
+
+She nodded to the servant, who clapped her hands.  At once came
+a stream of Hillmen, robed in white, who carried sherbet in bottles
+cooled in snow and dishes fragrant with hot food.  He recognized
+his own prisoners from the Mir Khan Palace jail, and nodded to
+them as they set the things down under the maid's direction.  When
+they had done the woman chased them out and came and stood behind
+Yasmini with a fan, for though it was not too hot, she liked to
+have her golden hair blown into movement.
+
+"My cook was a viceroy's," she said, beginning to eat.  "He killed
+an officer who said the curry had pig's fat in it.  That made him
+free of Khinjan but of not many other places!  I have promised him
+a swim in Earth's Drink when he ever forgets his art!"
+
+King ate, because a man can not talk and eat at once.  It was true
+that he was hungry, that hunger is a piquant sauce, and that artist
+was an adjective too mild to apply to the cook.  But the other
+reason was his chief one.  Yasmini ate daintily, as if only to keep
+him company.
+
+"You would rather have wine?" she asked suddenly.  "All sahibs drink
+wine.  Bring wine!" she ordered.
+
+But King shook his head, and she looked pleased.
+
+He had thought she would be disappointed.  When he had finished
+eating she drove the maid away with a sharp word;  and when King
+jumped to his feet she led him toward the gold-and-ivory thrones,
+taking her seat on one of them and bidding him adjust the footstool.
+
+"Would I might offer you the other!" she said, merrily enough, "but
+you must sit at my feet until our hearts are one!"
+
+It was clear that she took no delight in easy victories, for she
+laughed aloud at the quizzical expression on his face.  He guessed
+that if she could have conquered him at the first attempt a day
+would have found her weary of him;  there was deliberate wisdom
+in his plan for the present to seem to let her win by little inches
+at a time.  He reasoned that so she would tell him more than if
+he defied her outright.
+
+He brought an ivory footstool and set it about a yard away from
+her waxen toes.  And she, watching him with burning eyes, wound
+tresses of her hair around the golden dagger handle, making her
+jewels glitter with each movement.
+
+"You pleased me by refusing wine," she said.  "You please me--oh,
+you please me!  Christians drink wine and eat beef and pig-meat.
+Ugh!  Hindu and Muslim both despise them, having each a little
+understanding of his own.  The gods of India, who are the only
+real gods, what do they think of it all!  They have been good to
+the English, but they have had no thanks.  They will stand aside
+now and watch a greater jihad than the world has ever seen!  And
+the Hindu, who holds the cow sacred, will not support Christians
+who hold nothing sacred, against Muhammadans who loathe the pig!
+Christianity has failed!  The English must go down with it--just
+as Rome went down when she dabbled in Christianity.  Oh, I know
+all about Rome!"
+
+"And the gods of India?" he asked, to keep her to the point now
+that she seemed well started.
+
+He was there to learn, not to teach.
+
+"I know them, too!  I know them as nobody else does!  They are
+neither Hindu, nor Muhammadan, but are older by a thousand ages
+than either foolishness!  I love them, and they love me--as you
+shall love me, too!  If they did not love both of us, we would
+not both be here!  We must obey them!"
+
+None of the East's amazing ways of courtship are ever tedious.
+Love springs into being on an instant and lives a thousand years
+inside an hour.  She left no doubt as to her meaning.  She and
+King were to love, as the East knows love, and then the world might
+have just what they two did not care to take from it.
+
+His only possible course as yet was the defensive, and there is
+no defense like silence.  He was still.
+
+"The sirkar," she went on, "the silly sirkar fears that perhaps
+Turkey may enter the war.  Perhaps a jihad may be proclaimed.  So
+much for fear!  I know!  I have known for a very long time!  And I
+have not let fear trouble me at all!"
+
+Her eyes were on his steadily, and she read no fear in his, either,
+for none was there.  In hers he saw ambition--triumph already--
+excitement--the gambler's love of all the hugest risks.  Behind
+them burned genius and the devilry that would stop at nothing.  As
+the general had told him in Peshawur, she would dare open Hell's
+gate and ride the devil down the Khyber for the fun of it.
+
+"Au diable, diable et demie!" the French say;  and like most French
+proverbs it is a wise one.  But whence the devil and a half should
+come to thwart her was not obvious.
+
+"I must be a devil and a half," he told himself, and very nearly
+laughed aloud at the idea.  She mistook the sudden humor in his
+eyes for admiration of herself, being used to that from men.
+
+"Listen, while I tell you all from the beginning!  The sirkar sent
+me to discover what may be this 'Heart of the Hills' men talk about.
+I found these caves--and this!  I told the sirkar a little about
+the Caves, and nothing at all about the Sleepers.  But even at that
+they only believed the third of what I said.  And I--back in Delhi
+I bought books--borrowed books--sent to Europe for more books--and
+hired babu Sita Ram to read them to me, until his tongue grew dry
+and swollen and he used to fall asleep in a corner.  I know all
+about Rome!  Days I spent--weeks!--months!--listening to the history
+of their great Caesar, and their little Caesars--of their conquests
+and their games!  It was good, and I understood it all!  Rome should
+have been true to the old gods, and they would have been true to her!
+She fell when she fooled with Christianity!"
+
+She was speaking dreamily now, with her chin resting on a hand and
+an elbow on the ivory arm of the throne, remembering as she told
+her story.  And it meant so much to her, she was so in earnest,
+that her voice conjured up pictures for King to see.
+
+"When I had read enough I came back here to think.  I knew enough
+now to be sure that the Sleeper is a Roman, and the 'Heart of the
+Hills' a Grecian maid.  She is like me.  That is why I know she
+drove him to make an empire, choosing for a beginning these 'Hills'
+where Rome had never penetrated.  He found her in Greece.  He
+plunged through Persia to build a throne for her!  I have seen it
+all in dreams, and again in the crystal!  And because I was all alone,
+I saw that I would need all the skill I could learn, and much patience.
+So I began to learn to dance as she danced, using those pictures of
+her as a model.  I have surpassed her!  I can dance better than she
+ever did!
+
+"Between times I would go to Delhi and dance there a little, and
+a little in other places--once indeed before a viceroy, and once
+for the king of England--and all men--the king, too!--told me that
+none in the world can dance as I can!  And all the while I kept
+looking for the man--the man who should be like the Sleeper, even
+as I am like her whom be loved!
+
+"Many a man--many and many a man I have tried and found wanting!
+For I was impatient in spite of resolutions.  I burned to find him
+at once, and begin!  But you are the first of all the men I have
+tested who answered all the tests!  Languages--he must speak the
+native tongues.  Brave be must be--and clever--resembling the Sleeper
+in appearance.  I began to think long ago that I must forego that
+last test, for there was none like the Sleeper until you came.  And
+when this world war broke--for it is a world war, a world war I tell
+you!--I thought at last that I must manage all alone.  And then
+you came!
+
+"But there were many I tried--many--especially after I abandoned
+the thought that the man must resemble the Sleeper.  There was a
+Prince of Germany who came to India on a hunting trip.  You remember?"
+
+King pricked his ears and allowed himself to grin, for in common
+with many hundred other men who had been lieutenants at the time,
+he would once have given an ear and an eye to know the truth of
+that affair.  The grin transformed his whole appearance, until
+Yasmini beamed on him.
+
+"I'm listening, Princess!" he reminded her.
+
+"Well--he came--the Prince of Germany--the borrower!"
+
+"Borrower of what, Princess?"
+
+"Of wit!  Of brains!  Of platitudes!  Of reputation!  There came
+a crowd with him of such clumsy plunderers, asking such rude questions,
+that even the sirkar could not shut its ears and eyes!
+
+"I did not know all about sahibs in those days.  I thought that,
+although this man is what he is, yet he is a prince, and perhaps
+I can fire him with my genius.  I could have taught him the native
+tongues.  I thought he had ambition, but I learned that he is only
+greedy.  You see, I was foolish, not knowing yet that in good time
+if I am patient my man will come to me!  But I learned all about
+Germans--all!
+
+"I offered him India first, then Asia, then the world--even as I
+now offer them to you.  The sirkar sent him to see me dance, and
+he stayed to hear me talk.  When I saw at last that he has the
+head and heart of a hyena I told him lies.  But he, being drunk,
+told me truths that I have remembered.
+
+"Later be sent two of his officers to ask me questions, and they
+were little better than he, although a little better mannered.  I
+told them lies, too, and they told me lies, but they told me much
+that was true.
+
+"Then the prince came again, a last time.  And I was weary of him.
+The sirkar was very weary of him too.  He offered me money to go
+to Germany and dance for the kaiser in Berlin.  He said I will be
+shown there much that will be to my advantage.  I refused.  He made
+me other offers.  So I spat in his face and threw food at him.
+
+"He complained to the sirkar against me, sending one of his high
+officers to demand that I be whipped.  So I told the sirkar some--
+not much, indeed, but enough--of the things he and his officers
+had told me.  And the sirkar said at once that there was both cholera
+and bubonic plague, and he must go home!
+
+"I have heard--three men told me--that he said he will never rest
+until I have been whipped!  But I have heard that his officers
+laughed behind his back.  And ever since that time there have
+always been Germans in communication with me.  I have had more
+money from Berlin than would bribe the viceroy's council, and I
+have not once been in the dark about Germany's plans--although
+they have always thought I am in the dark.
+
+"I went on looking for my man--studying all, Germans, English, Turks,
+French--and there was a Frenchman whom I nearly chose--and an
+American, a man who used the strangest words, who laughed at me.
+I studied Hindu, Muslim, Christian, every good-looking fighting
+man who came my way, knowing well that all creeds are one when the
+gods have named their choice.
+
+"There came that old Bull-with-a-beard, Muhammad Anim, and for a
+time I thought he is the man, for he is a man whatever else he is.
+But I tired of him.  I called him Bull-with-a-beard, and the 'Hills'
+took it up and mocked him, until the new name stuck.  He still
+thinks he is the man, having more strength to hope and more will
+to will wrongly than any man I ever met, except a German.  I have
+even been sure sometimes that Muhammad Anim is a German;  yet now
+I am not sure.
+
+"From all the men I met and watched I have learned all they knew!
+And I have never neglected to tell the sirkar sufficient of what
+men have told me, to keep the sirkar pleased with me!
+
+"Nor have I ever played Germany's game--no, no!  I have talked
+with a prince of Germany, and I understand too well!  Who sups
+with a boar may get good roots to eat, but must endure pigs' feet
+in the trough!  Pigs' hides make good saddles;  I have used the
+Germans, as they think they have used me!  I have used them ruthlessly.
+
+"Knowing all I knew, and being ready except that I had not found
+my man yet, I dallied in India on the eve of war, watching a certain
+Sikh to discover whether he is the man or not.  But he lacked
+imagination, and I was caught in Delhi when war broke and the
+English dosed the Khyber Pass.  Yet I had to come up the Khyber,
+to reach Khinjan.
+
+"So it was fortunate that I knew of a German plot that I could spoil
+at the last minute.  I fooled the Germans by letting the Sikh whom
+I had watched discover it.  The Germans still believe me their
+accomplice--and the sirkar was so pleased that I think if I had
+asked for an English peerage they would have answered me soberly.
+A million dynamite bombs was a big haul for the sirkar!  My offer
+to go to Khinjan and keep the 'Hills' quiet was accepted that same day!
+
+"But what are a million dynamite bombs!  Dynamite bombs have been
+coming into Khinjan month by month these three years!  Bombs and
+rifles and cartridges!  Muhammad Anim's men, whom be trusts because
+he must, hid it all in a cave I showed them, that they think, and
+he thinks, has only one entrance to it.  Muhammad Anim scaled it,
+and he has the key.  But I have the ammunition!
+
+"There was another way out of that cave, although there is none now,
+for I have blocked it.  My men, whom I trust because I know them,
+carried everything out by the back way, and I have it all.  I will
+show it to you presently.
+
+"I know all Muhammad Anim's plans.  Bull-with-a-beard believes
+himself a statesman, yet he told me all he knows!  He has told me
+how Germany plans to draw Turkey in and to force Turkey to proclaim
+a jihad.  As if I did not know it first, almost before the Germans
+knew it!  Fools!  The jihad will recoil on them!  It will be like
+a cobra, striking whoever stirs it!  A typhoon, smiting right and
+left!  Christianity is doomed, and the Germans call themselves
+Christians!  Fools!  Rome called herself Christian--and where is Rome?
+
+"But we, my warrior, when Muhammad Anim gets the word from Germany
+and gives the sign, and the 'Hills' are afire, and the whole East
+roars in the flame of the jihad--we will put ourselves at the head
+of that jihad, and the East and the world is ours!"
+
+King smiled at her.
+
+"The East isn't very well armed," he objected. "Mere numbers--"
+
+"Numbers?"  She laughed at him.  "The West has the West by the throat!
+It is tearing itself!  They will drag in America!  There will be
+no armed nation with its hands free--and while those wolves fight,
+other wolves shall come and steal the meat!  The old gods, who built
+these caverns in the 'Hills,' are laughing!  They are getting ready!
+Thou and I--"
+
+As she coupled him and herself together in one plan she read the
+changed expression of his face--the very quickly passing cloud that
+even the best-trained man can not control.
+
+"I know!" she asserted, sitting upright and coming out of her dream
+to face facts as their master.  She looked more lovely now than ever,
+although twice as dangerous.  "You are thinking of your brother--
+of his head!  That I am a murderess who can never be your friend!
+Is that not so?"
+
+He did not answer, but his eyes may have betrayed something, for
+she looked as if he had struck her.  Leaning forward, she held the
+gold-hilted dagger out to him, hilt first.
+
+"Take it and stab me!" she ordered.  "Stab--if you blame me for
+your brother's death!  I should have known him for your brother
+if I had come on him in the dark!--His head might have come from
+your shoulders!--You were like a man holding up his own head, as
+I have seen in pictures in a book!  I would never have killed him!"
+
+Her golden hair fell all about his shoulders, and its scent was
+not intended to be sobering.  She ran warm fingers through his hair
+while she held the knife toward him with the other hand.
+
+"Take it and stab!"
+
+"No," he said.
+
+"No!" she laughed.  "No!  You are my warrior--my man--my well--
+beloved!  You have come to me alone out of all the world!  You
+would no more stab me than the gods would forget me!"
+
+Their eyes were on each other's--deep looking into deep.
+
+"Strength!" she said, flinging him away and leaning back to look
+at him, almost as a fed cat stretches in the sunlight.  "Courage!
+Simplicity!  Directness!  Strength I have, too, and courage never
+failed me, but my mind is a river winding in and out, gathering
+as it goes.  I have no directness--no simplicity!  You go straight
+from point to point, my sending from the gods!  I have needed you!
+Oh, I have needed you so much, these many years!  And now that you
+have come you want to hate me because you think I killed your brother!
+Listen--I will tell you all I know about your brother."'
+
+Without a scrap of proof of any kind he knew she was telling truth
+unadorned--or at least the truth as she saw it.  Eye to eye, there
+are times when no proof is needed.
+
+"Without my leave, Muhammad Anim sent five hundred men on a foray
+toward the Khyber.  Bull-with-a-beard needed an Englishman's head,
+for proof for a spy of his who could not enter Khinjan Caves.  They
+trapped your brother outside Ali Masjid with fifty of his men.  They
+took his head after a long fight, leaving more than a hundred of
+their own in payment.
+
+"Bull-with-a-beard was pleased.  But he was careless, and I sent
+my men to steal the head from his men.  I needed evidence for you.
+And I swear to you --I swear to you by my gods who have brought
+us two together--that I first knew it was your brother's head when
+you held it up in the Cavern of Earth's Drink!  Then I knew it
+could not be anybody else's head!"
+
+"Why bid me throw it to them, then?" he asked her, and he was aware
+of her scorn before the words had left his lips.
+
+She leaned back again and looked at him through lowered eyes, as
+if she must study him all anew.   She seemed to find it hard to
+believe that he really thought so in the commonplace.
+
+"What is a head to me, or to you--a head with no life in it--carrion!--
+compared to what shall be?  Would you have known it was his head if
+you had thrown it to them when I ordered you?"
+
+He understood.  Some of her blood was Russian, some Indian.
+
+"A friend is a friend, but a brother is a rival," says the East,
+out of world-old experience, and in some ways Russia is more eastern
+than the East itself.
+
+"Muhammad Anim shall answer to you for your brother's head!" she
+said with a little nod, as if she were making concessions to a child.
+"At present we need him.  Let him preach his jihad, and loose it
+at the right time.  After that he will be in the way!  You shall
+name his death--Earth's Drink--slow torture--fire!  Will that
+content you?"
+
+"No," he said, with a dry laugh.
+
+"What more can you ask?"
+
+"Less!  My brother died at the head of his men.  He couldn't ask
+more.  Let Bull-with-a-beard alone."
+
+She set both elbows on her knees and laid her chin on both hands
+to stare at him again.  He began to remember long-forgotten schoolboy
+lore about chemical reagents, that dissolve materials into their
+component parts, such was the magic of her eyes.  There were no
+eyes like hers that he had ever seen, although Rewa Gunga's had
+been something like them.  Only Rewa Gunga's had not changed so.
+Thought of the Rangar no sooner crossed his mind than she was speaking
+of him.
+ 
+"Rewa Gunga met you in the dark, beyond those outer curtains,  did
+he not?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Did he tell you that if you pass the curtains you shall be told
+all I know?"
+
+He nodded again, and she laughed.
+
+"It would take time to tell you all I know!  First, I think I will
+show you things.  Afterward you shall ask me questions, and I will
+answer them!'
+
+She stood up, and of course he stood up, too.  So, she on the
+footstool of the throne, her eyes and his were on a level.  She
+laid hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes until he
+could see his own twin portraits in hers that were glowing sunset
+pools.  Heart of the Hills?  The Heart of all the East seemed to
+bum in her, rebellious!
+
+"Are you believing me?" she asked him.
+
+He nodded, for no man could have helped believing her.  As she
+knew the truth, she was telling it to him, as surely as she was
+doing her skillful best to mesmerize him.  But the Secret Service
+is made up of men trained against that.
+
+"Come!" she said, and stepping down she took his arm.
+
+She led him past the thrones to other leather curtains in a wall,
+and through them into long hewn passages from cavern into cavern,
+until even the Rock of Gibraltar seemed like a doll's house in
+comparison.
+
+In one cave there were piles of javelins that had been stacked
+there by the Sleeper and his men.  In another were sheaves of arrows;
+and in one were spears in racks against a wall.  There were empty
+stables, with rings made fast into the rock where a hundred horses
+could have stood in line.
+
+She showed him a cave containing great forges, where the bronze
+had been worked, with charcoal still piled up against the wall at
+one end.  There were copper and tin ingots in there of a shape he
+had never seen.
+
+"I know where they came from," she told him.  "I have made it my
+business to know all the 'Hills.'  I know things the Hillmen's
+great-great-great-grand-fathers forgot!  I know old workings that
+would make a modem nation rich!  We shall have money when we need it,
+never fear!  We shall conquer India while the English backs are
+turned and the best troops are oversea.  We will bring a hundred
+thousand slaves back here to work our mines!  With what they dig
+from the mines, copper and gold and tin, we will make ready to buy
+the English off when they are free to turn this way again.  The
+English will do anything for money!  They will be in debt when
+this war is over, and their price will be less then than now!"
+
+She laughed merrily at him because his face showed that he did
+not appreciate that stricture.  Then she called him her Warrior
+and her Well-beloved and took him down a long passage, holding his
+hand all the way, to show him slots cut in the floor for the use
+of archers.
+
+"You entered Khinjan Caves by a tunnel under this floor, Well-beloved.
+There is no other entrance!"
+
+By this time Well-beloved was her name for him, although there was
+no air of finality about it.  It was as if she paved the way for
+use of Athelstan and that was a sacred name.  It was amazing how
+she conveyed that impression without using words.
+
+"The Sleeper cut these slots for his archers.  Then he had another
+thought and set these cauldrons in place, to boil oil to pour down.
+Could any army force a way through by the route by which you entered?"
+
+"No," he said, marveling at the ton-weight copper cauldrons, one
+to each hole.
+
+"Even without rifles for the defense?"
+
+"No," he said.
+
+"And I have more than a thousand Mauser rifles here, and more than
+a million rounds of ammunition!"
+
+"How did you get them?"
+
+"I shall tell you that later.  Come and see some other things.  See
+and believe!"
+
+She showed him a cave in which boxes were stacked in high square piles.
+
+"Dynamite bombs!" she boasted.  "How many boxes?  I forget!  Too
+many to count!  Women brought them all the way from the sea, for
+even Muhammad Anim could not make Afridi riflemen carry loads.  I
+have wondered what Bull-with-a-beard will say when he misses his
+precious dynamite!"
+
+"You've enough in there to blow the mountain up!" King advised her.
+"If somebody fired a pistol in here, the least would be the collapse
+of this floor into the tunnel below with a hundred thousand tons
+of rock on top of it.  There is no other way out?"
+
+"Earth's Drink!" she said, and he made a grimace that set her
+to laughing.
+
+But she looked at him darkly after that and he got the impression
+that the thought was not new to her, and that she did not thank
+him for the advice.  He began to wonder whether there was anything
+she had not thought of--any loophole she had left him for escape--
+any issue she had not foreseen.
+
+"Kill her!" a secret voice urged him.  But that was the voice of
+the "Hills," that are violent first and regretful afterward.  He
+did not listen to it.  And then the wisdom of the West came to him,
+as epitomized by Cocker along the lines laid down by Solomon.
+
+"It isn't possible to make a puzzle that has no solution to it.
+The fact that it's a puzzle is the proof that there's a key!  Go ahead!"
+
+It was the "Go ahead!" that Solomon omitted, and that makes Cocker
+such cheerful reading.  King ceased conjecturing and gave full
+attention to his guide.
+
+She showed him where eleven hundred Mauser rifles stood in racks in
+another cave, with boxes of ammunition piled beside them--each rifle
+and cartridge worth its weight in silver coin--a very rajah's ransom!
+
+"The Germans are generous in some things--only in some things--very
+mean in others!" she told him.  "They sent no medical stores, and
+no blankets!"
+
+Past caves where provisions of every imaginable kind were stored,
+sufficient for an army, she led him to where her guards slept together
+with the thirty special men whom King had brought with him up the Khyber.
+
+"I have five hundred others whom I dare trust to come in here,"
+she said, "but they shall stay outside until I want them.  A mystery
+is a good thing!  It is good for them all to wonder what I keep
+in here!  It is good to keep this sanctuary;  it makes for power!"
+
+Pressing very close to him, she guided him down another dark tunnel
+until he and she stood together in the jaws of the round hole above
+the river, looking down into the cavern of Earth's Drink.
+
+Nobody looked up at them.  The thousands were too busy working up
+a frenzy for the great jihad that was to come.
+ 
+Stacks of wood had been piled up, six-man high in the middle, and
+then fired.  The heat came upward like a furnace blast, and the
+smoke was a great red cloud among the stalactites.  Round and round
+that holocaust the thousands did their sword-dance, yelling as the
+devils yelled at Khinjan's birth.  They needed no wine to craze them.
+They were drunk with fanaticism, frenzy, lust!
+
+"The women brought that wood from fifty miles away!" Yasmini shouted
+in his ear;  for the din, mingling with the river's voice, made a
+volcano chord.  "It is a week's supply of wood!  But so they are--
+so they will be!  They will lay waste India!  They will butcher and
+plunder and burn!  It will be what they leave of India that we shall
+build anew and govern, for India herself will rise to help them lay
+her own cities waste!  It is always so!  Conquests always are so!  Come!"
+
+She tugged at him and led him back along the tunnel and through
+other tunnels to the throne room, where she made him sit at her
+feet again.
+
+The food had been cleared away in their absence.  Instead, on the
+ebony table there were pens and ink and paper.
+
+She leaned back on her throne, with bare feet pressed tight against
+the footstool, staring, staring at the table and the pens, and
+then at King, as if she would compose an ultimatum to the world
+and send King to deliver it.
+
+"I said I will tell you," she sad slowly.  "Listen!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIV
+
+
+
+Nothing new! Nothing new!
+Nowhere to hide when a reckoning's due,
+But right earns right, and wrong gets rue,
+With nothing deducted or given in lieu;
+And neither the War God, I, nor you
+Ever could make one lie come true!
+        Vale, Ceasar!
+
+
+As Yasmini herself had admitted, she headed from point to point
+after a manner of her own.
+
+"You know where is Dar es Salaam?" she asked.
+
+"East Africa," said King.
+
+"How far is that from here?"
+
+"Two or three thousand miles."
+
+"And English war-ships watch the Persian Gulf and all the seas
+from India to Aden?"
+
+King nodded.
+
+"Have the English any ships that dive under water?"
+
+He nodded again.
+
+"In these waters?"
+
+"I think not.  I'm not sure, but I think not."
+
+"The grenades you have seen, and the rifles and cartridges were
+sent by the Germans to Dar es Salaam, to suppress a rising of
+African natives.  Does it begin to grow clear to you, my friend?"
+
+He smiled as well as nodded this time.
+
+"Muhammad Anim used to wait with a hundred women at a certain place
+on the seashore.  What he found on the beach there he made the
+women carry on their heads to Khinjan.  And by the time be had
+hidden what he found and returned from Khinjan to the beach, there
+were more things to find and bring.  So they worked, he and the
+Germans, for I know not how long--with the English watching the
+seas as on land lean wolves comb the valleys.
+
+"Did you ever hear of the big whale in the Gulf?"
+
+"No," said King.  That was natural.  There are as a rule about as
+many whales as salmon in the Persian Gulf.
+
+"A German who came to me in Delhi--he who first showed me pictures
+of an underwater ship--said that at that time the officers and
+crew of one such ship were getting great practise.  Do you suppose
+their practise made whales take refuge in the Gulf?"
+
+"How should I know, Princess?"
+
+"Because I heard a story later, of an English cruiser on its way
+up the Gulf, that collided with a whale.  The shock of hitting it
+bent many steel plates, and the cruiser had to put back for repair.
+It must have been a very big whale, for there was much oil on the
+sea for a long time afterward.  So I heard.
+
+"And no more dynamite came--nor rifles--nor cartridges, although
+the Germans bad promised more.  And orders for Muhammad Anim that
+had been said to come by sea came now by way of Bagdad, carried
+by pilgrims returning from the holy places.  I know that because
+I intercepted a letter and threw its bearer into Earth's Drink to
+save Muhammad Anim the trouble of asking questions."
+
+"What were the terms of the German bargain?" King asked her.  "What
+stipulations did they make?"
+
+"With the tribes?  None!  They were too wise.  A jihad was decided
+on in Germany's good time;  and when that time should come ten
+rifles in the 'Hills' and a thousand cartridges would mean not
+only a hundred dead Englishmen, but ten times that number busily
+engaged.  Why bargain when there was no need?  A rifle is what it is.
+The 'Hills' are the 'Hills'!
+
+"Tell me about your lamp oil, then," he said.  "You burn enough
+oil in Khinjan Caves to light Bombay!  That does not come by submarine.
+The sirkar knows how much of everything goes up the Khyber.  I have
+seen the printed lists myself--a few hundred cans of kerosene--a
+few score gallons of vegetable oil, and all bound for farther north.
+There isn't enough oil pressed among the 'Hills' to keep these
+caves going for a day.  Where does it all come from?"
+
+She laughed, as a mother laughs at a child's questions, finding
+delicious enjoyment in instructing him.
+
+"There are three villages, not two days' march from Khabul, where
+men have lived for centuries by pressing oil for Khinjan Caves,"
+she said.  "The Sleeper fetched his oil thence.  There are the bones
+of a camel in a cave I did not show you, and beside the camel are
+the leather bags still in which the oil was carried.  Nowadays it
+comes in second-hand cans and drums.  The Sleeper left gold in here.
+Those who kept the Sleeper's secret paid for the oil in gold.  No
+Afghan troubled why oil was needed, so long as gold paid for it,
+until Abdurrahman heard the story.  He made a ten-year-long effort
+to learn the secret, but he failed.  When he cut off the supply
+of oil for a time, there was A rebellion so close to Khabul gates
+that he thought better of it.  Of gold and Abdurrahman, gold was
+the stronger.  And I know where the Sleeper dug his gold!"
+
+They sat in silence for a long while after that, she looking at
+the table, with its ink and pens and paper, and he thinking, with
+hands clasped round one knee;
+for it is wiser to think than to talk, even when a woman is near
+who can read thoughts that are not guarded.
+
+"Most disillusionments come simply," King said at last.  "D'you
+know, Princess, what has kept the sirkar from really believing in
+Khinjan Caves?"
+
+She shook her head. "The gods!" she said.  "The gods can blindfold
+governments and whole peoples as easily as they can make us see!"
+
+"It was the fact that they knew what provisions and what oil and
+what necessities of life went up the Khyber and came down it.  They
+knew a place such as this was said to be could not be.  They knew it!
+They could prove it!"
+
+Yasmini nodded.
+
+"Let it be a lesson to you, Princess!"
+
+She stared, and her fiery-opal eyes began to change and glow.  She
+began to twist her golden hair round the dagger hilt again.  But
+always her feet were still on the footstool of the throne, as if
+she knew--knew--knew that she stood on firm foundations.  No sirkar
+ever doubted less than she, and the suggestions in King's little
+homily did not please her.  She looked toward the table again--then
+again into his eyes.
+
+"Athelstan!" she said.  "It sounds like a king's name!  What was
+the Sleeper's name?  I have often wondered!  I found no name in
+all the books about Rome that seemed to fit him.  None of the names
+I mouthed could make me dream as the sight of him could.  But,
+Athelstan!  That is a name like a king's!  It seems to fit him, too!
+Was there such a name, in Rome?"
+
+"No," he said.
+
+"What does it mean?" she asked him.
+
+"Slow of resolution!"
+ 
+She clapped her hands.
+
+"Another sign!" she laughed.  "The gods love me!  There always is
+a sign when I need one!  Slow of resolution, art thou?  I will
+speed thy resolution, Well-beloved!  You were quick to change from
+King, of the Khyber Rifle Regiment, to Kurram Khan.  Change now
+into my warrior--my dear lord--my King again!"
+
+She rose, with arms outstretched to him.  All her dancer's art,
+her untamed poetry, her witchery, were expressed in a movement.
+Her eyes melted as they met his.  And since he stood up, too, for
+manner's sake, they were eye to eye again--almost lip to lip.  Her
+sweet breath was in his nostrils.
+
+In another moment she was in his arms, clinging to him, kissing him.
+And if any man has felt on his lips the kiss of all the scented
+glamour of the East, let him tell what King's sensations were.
+Let Ceasar, who was kissed by Cleopatra, come to life and talk of it!
+
+King's arm is strong, and he did not stand like an idol.  His head
+might swim, but she, too, tasted the delirium of human passion
+loosed and given for a mad swift minute.  If his heart swelled to
+bursting, so must hers have done.
+
+"I have needed you!" she whispered.  "I have been all alone!  I
+have needed you!"
+
+Then her lips sought his again, and neither spoke.
+
+Neither knew how long it was before she began to understand that he,
+not she, was winning.  The human answer to her appeal was full.  He
+gave her all she asked of admiration, kiss for kiss.  And then--her
+arms did not cling so tightly, although his strong right arm was
+like a stanchion.  Because be knew that he, not she, was winning,
+he picked her up in his arms and kissed her as if she were a child.
+And then, because he knew he had won, he set her on her feet on
+the footstool of the throne, and even pitied her.
+
+She felt the pity.  As she tossed the hair back over her shoulder
+her eyes glowed with another meaning--dangerous--like a tiger's glare.
+
+"You pity me?  You think because I love you, you can feed my love
+on a plate to the Indian government?  You think my love is a weapon
+to use against me?  Your love for me may wait for a better time?
+You are not so wise as I thought you, Athelstan!"
+
+But he knew he had won.  His heart was singing down inside him as
+it had not sung since he left India behind.  But he stood quite
+humbly before her, for had he not kissed her?
+
+"You think a kiss is the bond between us?  You mistake!  You forget!
+The kiss, my Athelstan, was the fruit, not the seed!  The seed came
+first!  If I loosed you--if I set you free--you would never dare
+go back to India!"
+
+He scarcely heard her.  He knew he had won.  His heart was like a
+bird, fluttering wildly.  He knew that the next step would be shown
+him, and for the present he had time and grace to pity her, knowing
+how he would have felt if she had won.  Besides, he had kissed her,
+and he had not lied.  Each kiss had been a tribute of admiration,
+for was she not splendid--amazing--more to be desired than wine?
+He stood with bowed head, lest the triumph in his eyes offend her.
+Yet if any one had asked him how he knew that he had won, he never
+could have told.
+
+"If you were to go back to India except as its conqueror, they
+would strip the buttons from your uniform and tear your medals off
+and shoot you in the back against a wall!  My signature is known
+in India and I am known.  What I write will be believed.  Rewa
+Gunga shall take a letter.  He shall take two--four--witnesses.  He
+shall see them on their way and shall give them the letter when
+they reach the Khyber and shall send them into India with it.  Have
+no fear.  Bull-with-a-beard shall not intercept them, as I have
+intercepted his men.  When Rewa Gunga shall return and tell me he
+saw my letter on its way down the Khyber, then we shall talk again
+about pity--you and I!  Come!"
+
+She took his arm, as if her threats had been caresses.  Triumph
+shone from her eyes.  She tossed her brave chin and laughed at him,
+only encouraged to greater daring by his attitude.
+
+"Why don't you kill me?" she asked, and though his answer surprised
+her, it did not make her angry.
+
+"It would do no good," he said simply.
+
+"Would you kill me if you thought it would do good?"
+
+"Certainly!" he said.
+
+She laughed at that as if it were the greatest joke she had ever
+heard.  It set her in the best humor possible, and by the time they
+reached the ebony table and she had taken the pen and dipped it
+in the ink, she was chuckling to herself as if the one good joke
+had grown into a hundred.
+
+She wrote in Urdu.  It is likely that for all her knowledge of the
+spoken English tongue she was not so swift or ready with the trick
+of writing it.  She had said herself that a babu read English books
+to her aloud.  But she wrote in Urdu with an easy flowing hand,
+and in two minutes she had thrown sand on the letter and had given
+it to King to read.  It was not like a woman's letter.  It did
+not waste a word.
+
+        "Your Captain King has been too much trouble.  He has
+        taken money from the Germans.  He adopted native dress.
+        He called himself Kurram Khan.  He slew his own brother
+        at night in the Khyber Pass.  These men will say that
+        he carried the head to Khinjan, and their word is true,
+        for I, Yasmini, saw.  He used the head for a passport,
+        to obtain admittance.  He proclaims a jihad!  He urges
+        invasion of India!  He held up his brother's head
+        before five thousand men and boasted of the murder.
+        The next you shall hear of your Captain King of the
+        Khyber Rifles, he will be leading a jihad into India.
+        You would have better trusted me.  Yasmini."
+
+He read it and passed it back to her.
+
+"They will not disbelieve me," she said, triumphant as the very
+devil over a branded soul all hot.  "They will be sure you are mad,
+and they will believe the witnesses!"
+
+He bowed.  She sealed the letter and addressed it with only a
+scrawled mark on its outer cover.  That, by the way, was utter
+insolence, for the mark would be understood at any frontier post
+by the officer commanding.
+
+"Rewa Gunga shall start with this to-day!" she said, with more
+amusement than malice.  After that she was still for a moment,
+watching his eyes, at a loss to understand his carelessness.  He
+seemed strangely unabased.  His folded arms were not defiant, but
+neither were they yielding.
+
+"I love you, Athelstan!" she said. "Do you love me?"
+
+"I think you are very beautiful, Princess!"
+
+"Beautiful?  I know I am beautiful.  But is that all?"
+
+"Clever!" he added.
+
+She began to drum with the golden dagger hilt on the table, and
+to look dangerous, which is not to infer by any means that she
+looked less lovely.
+
+"Do you love me?" she asked.
+
+"Forgive me, Princess, but you forget.  I was born east of Mecca,
+but my folk were from the West.  We are slower to love than some
+other nations.  With us love is more often growth, less often
+surrender at first sight.  I think you are wonderful."
+
+She nodded and tucked the sealed letter in her bosom.
+
+"It shall go," she said darkly, "and another letter with it.  They
+looted your brother's body.  In his pocket they found the note you
+wrote him, and that you asked him to destroy!  That will be evidence.
+That will convince!  Come!"
+
+He followed her through leather curtains again and down the dark
+passage into the outer chamber;  and the illusion was of walking
+behind a golden-haired Madonna to some shrine of Innocence.  Her
+perfume was like incense;  her manner perfect reverence.  She passed
+into the cave where the two dead bodies lay like a high priestess
+performing a rite.
+
+Walking to the bed, she stood for minutes, gazing at the Sleeper
+and his queen.  And from the new angle from which King saw him the
+Sleeper's likeness to himself was actually startling.  Startling--
+weird--like an incantation were Yasmini's words when at last she spoke.
+
+"Muhammad lied!  He lied in his teeth!  His sons have multiplied
+his lie!  Siddhattha, whom men have called Gotama, the Buddha, was
+before Muhammad and he knew more!  He told of the wheel of things,
+and there is a wheel!  Yet, what knew the Buddha of the wheel?  He
+who spoke of Dharma (the customs of the law) not knowing Dharma!
+This is true---Of old there was a wish of the gods--of the old gods.
+And so these two were.  There is a wish again now of the old gods.
+So, are we two not as they two were?  It is the same wish, and lo!
+We are ready, this man and!.  We will obey, ye gods--ye old gods!"
+
+She raised her arms and, going closer to the bed, stood there in
+an attitude of mystic reverence, giving and receiving blessings.
+
+"Dear gods!" she prayed. "Dear old gods--older than these 'Hills'--
+show me in a vision what their fault was--why these two were ended
+before the end!
+
+"I know all the other things ye have shown me.  I know the world's
+silly creeds have made it mad, and it must rend itself, and this
+man and I shall reap where the nations sowed--if only we obey!
+Wherein, ye old dear gods, who love me, did these two disobey?  I
+pray you, tell me in a vision!"
+
+She shook her head and sighed.  Sadness seemed to have crept over
+her, like a cold mist from the night.  It was as if she could dimly
+see her plans foredoomed, and yet hoped on in spite of it.  The
+fatalism that she scorned as Muhammad's lie held her in its grip,
+and her natural courage fought with it.  Womanlike, she turned to
+King in that minute and confided to him her very inmost thoughts.
+And he, without an inkling as to how she must fail, yet knew that
+she must, and pitied her.
+
+"Have you seen that breast under the armor?" she asked suddenly.
+"Come nearer!  Come and look!  Why did his breast decay and his
+body stay whole like hers?  Did she kill him?  Was that a dagger-
+stab in his breast?  I found perfume in these caves--great jars
+of it, and I use it always.  It is better than temple incense and
+all the breath of gardens in the spring!  I have put it on slaughtered
+animals.  Where the knife has touched them, they decay--as that man's
+breast did--but the rest of them remains undecaying year after year.
+It was a knife, I think, that pierced his breast.  I think that
+scent is the preservative. Did she kill him?  Was she jealous of him?
+How did she die?  There is no mark on her!  Athelstan--listen!  I
+think he would have failed her!  I think she stabbed him rather
+than see him fail, and then swallowed poison!  Afterward their
+servants laid them there.  She smiles in death because she knew
+the wheel will turn and that death dies too!  He looks grim because
+he knew less than she.  It is always woman who understands and man
+who fails!  I think she stabbed him.  She should have loved him better,
+and then there would have been no need.  I will love you better
+than she loved him!"
+
+She turned and devoured him with her eyes, so that it needed all
+his manhood to hold him back from being her slave that minute.  For
+in that minute she left no charm unexercised--sex--mesmerisrn--beauty--
+flattery (her eyes could flatter as a dumb dog's flatter a huntsman!)--
+grace unutterable-mystery--she used every art on him she knew.  Yet
+he stood the test.
+
+"Even if you fail me, Well-beloved, I will love you!  The gods who
+gave you to me will know how to make you love;  and lessons are to
+learn.  If you fail me I will forgive, knowing that in the end the
+gods will never let you fail me!  You are mine, and Earth is ours,
+for the old gods intend it so!"
+
+She seemed to expect him to take her in his arms again;  but he
+stood respectfully and made no answer, nor any move.  Grim and
+strong his jowl was, like the Sleeper's, and the dark hair three
+days old on it softened nothing of its lines.  His Roman nose and
+steady, dark, full eyes suggested no compromise.  Yet he was good
+to look at.  She had not lied when she said she loved him, and he
+understood her and was sorry.  But he did not look sorry, nor did
+he offer any argument to quench her love.  He was a servant of the
+raj;  his life and his love had been India's since the day he first
+buckled on his spurs, and Yasmini wouldn't have understood that.
+
+Nor did she understand that, even supposing he had loved her with
+all his heart, not on any conditions would he have admitted it until
+absolutely free, any more than that if she crucified him he would
+love her the same, supposing that he loved her at all.  Nor did
+she trust the "old gods" too well, or let them work unaided.
+
+"Come with me, Athelstan!" she said.  She took his arm--found
+little jeweled slippers in a closet hewn in the wall--put them on
+and led him to the curtains he had entered by.  She led him through
+them, and, red as cardinals in lamplight on the other side, they
+stood hand-in-hand, back to the leather, facing the unfathomable
+dark.  Her fingers were so strong that he could not have wrenched
+his own away without using the other hand to help.
+
+"Where are your shoes?" she asked him.
+
+"At the foot of these steps, Princess."
+
+"Can you see them yonder in the dark?"
+ 
+"No."
+
+"Can you guess where the darkness leads to?"
+
+"No."
+
+He shuddered and she chuckled.
+
+"Could you return alone by the way Ismail brought you ?"
+ 
+"I think not."
+
+"Will you try?"
+
+"If I must.  I am not afraid."
+
+"You have heard the echo?  Yes, I know you heard the echo.  Hear
+it again!"
+
+She raised her head and howled like a wolf--like a lone wolf that
+has found no quarry--melancholy, mean, grown reckless with his hunger.
+There was a pause of nearly a minute.  Then in the hideous darkness
+a phantom wolf-pack took up the howl in chorus, and for three long
+minutes there was din beside which the voice of living wolves at
+war would be a slumber song.  Ten times ghastlier than if it had
+been real, the chorus wailed and ululated back and forth along
+immeasurable distances--became one yell again--and went howling
+down into earth's bowels as if the last of a phantom pack were
+left behind and yelling to be waited for.
+
+When it ceased at last King was sweating.
+
+"Nor am I afraid," she laughed, squeezing his hand yet tighter.
+
+She led him down the steps, and at the foot told him to put on his
+slippers, as if be were a child.  Then, hurrying as if those opal
+eyes of hers were indifferent to dark or daylight, she picked her
+way among boulders that he could feel but not see, along a floor
+that was only smooth in places, for a distance that was long enough
+by two or three times to lose him altogether. 
+
+When he looked back there was no sign of red lights behind him.
+And when he looked forward, there was a dim outer light in front
+and a whiff of the cool fresh air that presages the dawn!
+
+She led him through a gap on to a ledge of rock that hung thousands
+of feet above the home of thunder, a ledge less than six feet wide,
+less than twenty long, tilted back toward the cliff.  There they sat,
+watching the stars.  And there they saw the dawn come.
+
+Morning looks down into Khinjan hours after the sun has risen,
+because the precipices shut it out.  But the peaks on every side
+are very beacons of the range at the earliest peep of dawn.  In
+silence they watched day's herald touch the peaks with rosy jeweled
+fingers--she waiting as if she expected the marvel of it all to
+make King speak.
+
+It was cold.  She came and snuggled close to him, and it was so
+they watched the sparkle of dawn's jewels die and the peaks grow
+gray again, she with an arm on his shoulder and strands of her
+golden hair blown past his face.
+
+"Of what are you thinking?" she asked him at last.
+
+"Of India, Princess."
+
+"What of India?"
+
+"She lies helpless."
+
+"Ah!  You love India?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You shall love me better!  You shall love me better than your life!
+Then, for love of me, you shall own the India you think you love!
+This letter shall go!"  She tapped her bosom.  "It is best to cut
+you off from India first.  You shall lose that you may win!"
+
+She got up and stood in the gap, smiling mockingly, framed in the
+darkness of the cave behind.
+
+"I understand!" she said.  "You think you are my enemy.  Love and
+hate never lived side by side.  You shall see!"
+
+Then in an instant she was gone, backward into the dark.  He sat
+and waited for her, cross-legged on the ledge.  As daylight began
+to filter downward he could dimly make out the waterfall, thundering
+like the whelming of a world;  he sat staring at it, trying to
+formulate a plan, until it dawned on him that he was nearly chilled
+to the bone.  Then he got up and stepped through the gap, too.
+
+"Princess!" he called.  Then louder, "Princess!"
+
+When the echo of his own voice died, it was as if the ghoul who
+made the echoes had taken shape.  A beard--red eye-rims--and a hook
+nose came out of the dark, and Ismail bared yellow teeth.
+
+"Come!" he said.  "Come, little hakim!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XV
+
+
+
+Private preserves?  New Notions?
+Measure me a quart of honesty,
+And I will trade it for a pound weight of my thoughts.
+Then you and I shall go and dream together
+A brand-new dream of things that never happened,
+Nor ever can be.  Come, trade with me!
+
+
+What Yasmini had been doing in the minutes while King stared from
+the ledge in the dawn was unguessable.  Perhaps she had been praying
+to her old gods.  At least she had given Ismail strict orders, for
+he said nothing, but seized King's hand and led him through the
+dark as a rat leads a blind one--swiftly, surely, unhesitating.
+King had no means whatever of guessing their direction.  They did
+not pass the two lights again with the curtain and the steps all
+glowing red.
+
+They came instead to other steps, narrow and steep, that led upward
+in a semicircle to a rough hole in a rock wall.  At the top there
+was a little yellow light, so dim and small that its rays scarcely
+sufficed to show the opening.
+
+"Go up!" said Ismail, giving King a shove and disappearing at once.
+One side-step into blackness and he might have been a mile away.
+
+So King went up, stooping to feel each next footing with a cautious
+hand.  He was beginning to be sleepy, and to suspect that Yasmini
+had taken him to view the dawn with just that end in view.  Nothing
+can make tired eyes so long for sleep as a glimpse of waking day--
+Sleepy eyes are easiest to trick.
+
+It was not many minutes before he was sure his guess was right.
+
+The opening at the head of the stairs led into a tunnel.  He followed
+it with a hand on either wall and reached another of Khinjan's
+strange leather curtains.  His face struck the leather unexpectedly,
+and at that instant, as if his touch were electric, the curtain
+sprang aside and his eyes were dazzled by the light of diamonds.
+
+It was Aladdin's Cave, with her acting spirit of the lamp!  It
+needed effort of self-control to know that the huge, white, cut
+crystals that sparkled all about the hewn cell could not be diamonds.
+They were as big as his head, and bigger--at least a hundred of them,
+and they multiplied the light of half a dozen little oil lamps
+until the cave seemed the home of light.
+
+Yasmini had not a jewel on her.  She was in a new mood and new
+garments to suit it.  Her feet were still bare, but she was robed
+from head to heel in pure white linen, on which her long hair shone
+as if it were truly strands of gold.  She received him with an air
+of mystic calm, gracious and dignified as the high-priestess of a
+Grecian temple.  She seemed devout--to have forgotten that she ever
+killed a man, or made a threat or plotted for a kingdom.
+
+"Be still," she said, raising a finger.  "The old gods talk to us
+in here.  It is not for us to answer them in words, but in deeds.
+Let us listen and do!"
+
+There were two cushions--great billowy modern ones, covered in gold
+brocade--on the floor in the midst of the cave.  Between them was
+a stand of ivory, some two feet high, whose top was a disk, cut
+from the largest tusk that ever could have been.  On the disk
+resting in a little hollow in the ivory, was a pure, perfect crystal
+sphere of a foot diameter.  He could see his reflection in it, and
+Yasmini's, too, the moment he entered the cave, and whichever way
+they moved both images remained undistorted.  He suspected that
+the lighting and the crystal reflectors had not been arranged at random.
+
+In each corner of the four-square cave there was a brazier of bronze,
+and from each rose incense smoke, straight upward.  The four streams
+of smoke met at the ceiling and converged into a cloud that hung
+almost motionless.
+
+Yasmini stepped very reverently to a cushion by the crystal in the
+middle, and signed to King to imitate her.  They stood facing.  She
+seemed to pray, for her eyes were hidden under the long lashes.
+Then she knelt, and King did the same, his knees sinking deep into
+another cushion.  So they knelt eye to eye above the crystal for
+many minutes without either saying a word.  It was Yasmini who
+spoke first.
+
+"The old gods have showed me the past many and many a time in this,"
+she said.  "It is, their way of speaking to me.  Now, to-day, I
+have prayed to them to show me the future.  Look!  Look, Athelstan!
+Do as I do--so!"
+
+There seemed nothing to be gained by disobeying her.  To obey her
+might be to win new insight into the ramifications of her plans.
+Men who have experience of the East are the last to deny that there
+is method in Eastern magic;  they glimpse the knowledge that belonged
+to Pharaoh's men, although unlike Moses they are not always able
+to confound it. The East forgets nothing.  The West ignores.  But
+there are men from the West who are willing to look and to listen
+and to try to understand;  like King, they go high in the Service.
+There are others who look on at the magic with an understanding
+eye and are caught by it.  Their end is not good to contemplate.
+The East is fettered in her own mesmeric spell and must suffer
+until she wakes.
+
+Yasmini held the upright column of the ivory stand with both hands,
+close under the disk at the top.  He copied her, placing his hands
+below hers.  Hers slipped down and covered his, soft and warm;  and
+so they stayed.
+
+"Look!" she said. "Look!"
+
+Her own eyes were grown big and round, and she gazed at the crystal
+ball as she had looked into King's eyes that night, with the very
+hunger of her soul.  Her lips were parted.  Watching her, King grew
+expectant, too.  His eyes followed hers, to stare into the middle
+of the crystal, no longer feeling sleepy, and in less than a minute
+he could not have withdrawn them had be tried.
+
+The crystal clouded over.  Yasmini's breath came steadily, with a
+little hissing sound between her teeth, and the crystal, or else
+the whole world, seemed to sway in time to it.  Then the man in
+Roman armor strode out of a mist, and all was steady again and easy
+to understand.  When the man in armor opened his lips to speak,
+one knew what he had said.  When be frowned, one knew why he frowned.
+When he smiled, one knew that she was coming.
+
+And she did come, dancing out of the mist behind him, to fling soft
+arms round his neck and whisper praises in his ear.  He stood like
+a king who has come into his own, with an arm round her and his
+chin held high.  She kissed him on his proud chin, and laughed into
+his face.
+
+There were troubles--difficulties, all in the mist behind, but he
+stood and despised them then while she caressed him!
+
+Just as spoken words had no part in the vision, yet the whole was
+understood, so time did not enter into it.  There was no connecting
+link between each scene;  each dissolved into the other, and all
+were one.
+
+She faded into mist, in a swirl of graceful drapery, and he frowned
+again.  A long line of men-at-arms stood before him, grim as he
+and as discontented.  They leaned on spears, at ease, and that
+seemed to annoy him most of all.  A spokesman stood out from the
+ranks and addressed him, with gesticulations and a head so far
+thrown back that his helmet-plume stood out like a secretary's pen
+behind him.  He was not a Roman, although there was something Roman
+about his attitude and armor.  None of the men-at-arms was a Roman.
+
+They demanded to be led home, wherever home was.  (It was as plain
+as if their spokesman had shouted it into King's ear aloud.)  And
+he refused them bluntly, proudly.
+
+Two men brought him a native woman, each holding an arm and thrusting
+her forward between them.  She was not at all unlike a native woman
+of to-day, either in dress or sullenness;  she had the beak and
+the keen eyes and the cruel lips of the "Hills."  They showed her
+to him, and it was quite clear that they compared her to their own
+women, left behind;  the comparison was plainly to her disadvantage.
+
+He wasted no argument on them, but his scorn made the two men fade
+away, and the woman with them.  Yet he had no scorn for his lined-up
+fighting men, and so could act none.  He ordered the spokesman back
+to the ranks, and the man obeyed.  He gave another order, and the
+long lines stood at attention, spears straight up and down, and
+their round sheilds like great medallions on a wall.  He ordered
+them away, but they stood still.
+
+Then he did a truly Roman thing.  He got his harness off--unbuckled
+and took off the great bronze corselet, in which be lay dead in
+another cave.  He threw it down--tore open the white shirt underneath--
+and held his arms out.  He bade them come and kill him.  He bade
+them drive their spears into his unprotected breast.
+
+There was not a movement down the line of men.  They stood as a
+cliff looks at the tide.  He dared them.  He called them cowards--
+women--weaklings afraid of blood.  But they stood still.  He strode
+up and down the line, seeking a man with heart enough to plunge a
+spear into him, and no man moved.
+
+Then he stood still before them all again and wept, because they
+loved him and he loved them.  And then she came, not dancing this
+time, but barefooted and walking like a poem of the early days of
+Greece.  She picked up his corselet and buckled it on him, making
+him hold up his arms and kneel while she slipped it over his head.
+And the grim men-at-arms hove their long spears up into the air
+and roared her an ovation, bringing down their right feet with a
+thunder all together.
+
+"Ave!"
+
+But the mist closed up and then the crystal was clear again.  It
+was Yasmini's voice that spoke, King looked up into her eyes, and
+they made him shudder, for he had never seen eyes like them.  Her
+hands still clasped his own, burning hot.  She was more terrible
+than Khinjan.
+
+"I never saw that before," she said.  "It is because you are here!
+We shall see it all now!  We shall know it all!  We shall know
+whether it was she who killed him, or whether his own men took
+him at his word.  We shall know!  Look again!  Look again!"
+
+His eyes seemed unable to obey his own will any longer.  They obeyed
+her voice.  He gazed again into the crystal, and it clouded over.
+But although he obeyed her, the crystal obeyed him and answered
+at least in part the questions his imagination asked.  He was not
+conscious of asking anything, but being a soldier his curiosity
+followed a more or less definite line.
+
+Yasmini's breath began to come and go again with the little hissing
+sound.  Her hot hands pressed his own.  The mist suddenly dissolved.
+There was a road--a long white road, across a plain, and the men-at-
+arms fought their way along it.  They were facing east.
+
+Archers opposed them--archers on foot, and cavalry--Parthians.  The
+Parthians were wild, but the drill of the men-at-arms was a thing
+to marvel at.  When the flights of arrows came they knelt behind
+their shields.  When the horsemen charged they closed in solid
+phalanx, and the inner ranks hurled javelins at ten-yard range.
+When the fury of the onslaught died they formed in column and went
+forward, gaining furlongs at a time while their enemy watched them
+and wondered.
+
+It was plain that the enemy expected them to retreat sooner or later,
+for the archers and cavalry were at great pains to get behind them,
+so that before long the road ahead was less well defended than
+that behind.  It did not seem to occur to the enemy that they were
+pressing toward the distant line of hills and did not seek to return
+at all.
+
+They had no baggage to impede them.  It was absurd to suppose they
+would not try to fight a way back soon.  They must be a Roman raiding
+party, out to teach Parthians a lesson.  Yet they pressed ever forward,
+and the hills grew ever nearer;  while he sat a great brown charger
+calmly in their midst and gave them not too many orders, but here
+and there a word of praise, and once or twice a trumpet shout of
+encouragement.  He seemed to own the knack of being wherever the
+fight was fiercest.  His mere presence seemed better than a hundred
+men when the phalanx bent before charging cavalry.
+
+She rode a little white horse, beside him always and utterly scornful
+of the risk.  She wore no armor--carried no shield.  Her bare feet
+showed through the sandal straps, and the outlines of her lissom
+body were quite visible through the muslin stuff she wore.  She
+might have just come from the dancing.  She had a flower in her hand,
+and a wreath of flowers in her hair.  She shouted more encouragement
+than he.  She shouted too much.  Once he laid a strong brown hand
+across her mouth, and she held it there and kissed it.
+
+They lost men--five or six or ten or twenty at each onslaught.
+Perhaps they had been a thousand strong in the beginning.  Their
+own men--the regimental surgeons probably--cut the throats of the
+badly wounded, to save them from the enemy's attentions;  and by
+this time they were not more than seven or eight hundred strong.
+
+But they went forward--ever forward--and the line of hills drew near.
+Then he began to stir himself, and she with him.  He shouted to them
+to charge, and she echoed him, leaving his side at last to take
+command of a wing and sting the tired-out men-at-arms into new
+enthusiasm.  In a minute they were a roaring tide that swept forward
+to the foot of the hills and surged upward without a check.  In a
+little while they were hurling boulders down on an enemy that seemed
+inclined to parley.
+
+Then, like a shadow of the incense cloud above, the mist closed
+up in the crystal again, and in a moment more King and Yasmini
+were looking into each other's eyes again above it.
+
+"I have seen that before," she said, shaking her, head.  "I am
+weary of their battles.  They won;  that is enough!  I must know
+how they failed, so that we make no such mistakes!"
+
+Her face was flushed, and her eyes glowed with the fire that is
+not lit by ordinary passion.  She was being eaten by ambition--
+burned by her own fire--by ambition not totally selfish, for she
+yearned to shepherd King as she seemed to think this woman of the
+vision had not shepherded the man in armor.
+
+"Look again!" she said.  "Look again!  And oh, ye old gods, show--
+show me wherein she failed!"
+
+They stared again, and once more the crystal clouded.  Out of the
+cloud came a city in the middle of a plain, and the city was besieged.
+It was not a very great city, but from the outside it looked rich,
+for domes and roofs and towers showed above the wall, all well built
+and well preserved.  He and she, sitting their horses out of arrow
+range from the main gate seemed confident of taking it and eager
+to get it over with.
+
+They no longer had only six or seven hundred men, but men by the
+thousand.  Their veterans in Roman armor were in command of others
+now, and they had a human pack-train with them, heavily burdened
+captives who sulked in chains under a guard.
+
+The mist cleared further, and the gate gave in under the blows of
+an improvised battering-ram, covered by showers of arrows from
+short range.  Then, like a river breaking down a dam, the thousands
+stormed in, howling.  Smoke rose.  There were screams of women.
+A great tower near the gate, that was half wood, half stone,
+crackled and curled up in yellow and crimson flame.  He and she
+rode in together as modern men and women ride through a gate to
+the covert side at a fox-hunt.  They chatted and laughed together,
+and their horses pranced, responding to the humor of their riders.
+
+King would have liked to tear his eyes away from the scenes that
+followed in the tree-lined streets, but the crystal ball held him
+as if in a trance--that and Yasmini's hands that clasped his own
+like hot torture chamber clamps.  Animals fighting to the death
+are not so vile, nor so inhuman as men can be in the hour of what
+they call victory.  Even the little children of that city paid the
+penalty for having closed the gate.
+
+Time was no measure to the crystal ball.  In minutes it showed the
+devil's work of hours.  The city went up in smoke and flame, and
+from the far side through a great breach in the wall the conquerors
+went out, with their plunder and such prisoners as had been saved
+to drag and carry it.
+ 
+Now there were wagons and camels and horses.  Now there were tents
+and furniture.  Now each man of the fighting force had as much as
+he himself could carry, as well as what was loaded on the prisoners.
+
+Only he and she seemed to care nothing for the loot and rode as
+if each was all the other needed.  Still he wore nothing but his
+armor, and she no more than her dancing dress and sandals.  But
+now she had eight prisoners to hold a panoply above her horse and
+keep the sun from her.
+
+She had flowers woven in her hair, and others in her hand, as if
+she rode from a bridal feast and were not in mourning for a plundered,
+butchered city.  They were headed northward now, toward distant
+mountains, and the dust of their long column went up like a river
+of smoke, flowing from the holocaust behind.
+
+Yasmini shook her head impatiently.  The crystal clouded over,
+and King's eyes were free.
+
+"I am tired of it," she said.  "I have seen that so many times.  I
+know they won.  I know they found their way to Khinjan.  I know they
+began to build an empire here.  I have seen all that a hundred times.
+
+What I must know is what mistake they made.  What did they do wrong?
+How did they come to fail?  Look again!  Let us look again!"
+
+She never once let King's hands go, but pressed them tighter and
+tighter until the circulation nearly stopped and they grew numb.
+Her own strength seemed endless--to grow rather than to wane in
+proportion as her yearning to look into the past grew.  Her attitude
+would have been more understandable if she had believed herself
+and King to be reincarnations of those forgotten conquerors;  but
+she was too original for that.  She had said the old gods wished,
+and the man and the woman were;  the old gods wished the same wish
+again, and she and King were.  Why then, if the old gods were
+contriving it all, should she seek to steady the ark for them?  But
+down at bottom there is no logic connected with gods many.  She
+clutched King's fingers as if to hold him there, and to make him
+see and understand the distant past, were the only way to save him
+from mistakes.
+
+"Look!" she insisted.  "Look again!"  And he obeyed her.  By this
+time obedience was much the easiest course.  Between times his eyes
+were so weary he could hardly hold them open, and it was only when
+he gazed into the crystal that he could rest them and feel easy.
+He knew well that she was winning control over him in some sort,
+and he fought against it grimly.  Soon he became weirdly conscious
+of being two men--one, whom she had grasped and overcome, a physical
+man who did not matter much, and another, mental man who was free
+from her, who could understand her, whom she could not reach or touch.
+
+"Look!" she insisted.  "Look!"  And the crystal clouded over.
+
+He strode out of the mist again, frowning, with his chin hung low
+and fists clenched tight at his sides.  Four of his own men came
+out of the mist to him and greeted him respectfully, yet not without
+a touch of irony.
+
+They spoke to him and pointed westward.  One laid a hand on his
+shoulder, but he shook it off and the man reeled back as if he had
+been struck.  Another man took up the argument, but he shook his head.
+They all spoke together, gesticulating and growing angry;  but he
+stood calm among them, as a rock stands in a storm.  He folded his
+arms across his breast after a while and listened, saying nothing.
+
+Then as if to end the argument for good and all, he drew his sword
+and held it out toward them, hilt first, telling them again to kill
+him and have done with it.  They refused.  He laughed at them, but
+they still refused;  so he put his sword back in the sheath.
+
+One of the men stepped into the mist and disappeared.  Presently
+he came again, with two others, helping a wounded man along between
+them.  Whoever the wounded man might be he was treated with respect.
+Prouder than Lucifer, he who had struck another man's hand from
+off his shoulder knelt to give this wounded man a knee and seemed
+pained when the man refused him.
+
+The wounded man pointed to the westward too and argued in short
+clipped-off sentences.  He had a day or two to live--certainly not
+longer, for the blood flowed slowly from a wound that would not
+stanch;  yet he argued as a man who has lost no interest in life,
+but rather sees its problems truly now that his own are near an end.
+
+He demanded something almost truculently.  He took his helmet off
+and passed it down to him.  With fingers that were growing feeble
+the wounded man held it and traced out the letters S. P. Q. R. on
+the front.
+
+"Go home!" he said, passing it back to him.  "Fight your way back
+home!"  What he said was as distinct as if a voice in the cave had
+spoken it.
+
+Then, vision within a vision--dream within a dream--there was a
+view of the Via Appia, with gaunt grim gallows set along it in a
+row and on them a regiment's commander crucified along with the
+remnant of his men.
+
+"So Rome treats traitors!" said a voice, that might have been either
+man's.
+
+But instantly there was another vision, of ten thousand wolves
+baying down a Himalayan gorge in winter-time, the sleet frozen
+stiff on their fur and their tongues hanging.  Eye and fang flashed
+altogether and made one gleam.
+
+"Choose!" said a voice.
+
+So he chose.  He nodded.  The men saluted him, and the wounded man
+was helped away to die.  And then she came, angry as a flash of
+lightning, to spring at him and cling to him and call him names--
+begging, demanding, ordering, crying--abusing him and praising him
+in turn.  He shook his head.  She sobbed, but he shook his head
+again and pointed westward.  Then she took him by the hand and led
+him away, not looking at his face again.
+
+The crystal ball grew clouded.  Yasmini's breath came and went as
+if she were running in a race, and her pressure on King's fingers
+was actually painful.  The mist dissolved, and King forgot the
+pressure--forgot everything.  The man in armor lay dead on his
+back in the cave on the wooden bed, and she bent over him, dagger
+in hand.
+
+"Ah!" said Yasmini, her teeth chattering.  "But what else could
+she do?"         The mist closed in again and the crystal grew opaque.
+"The future!" she begged.  "It is the future I must know!  Ye old
+gods, tell me!  Show me!"
+
+The mist turned red.  The crystal ball became as it were a ball
+of fire revolving within itself.  The fire turned to blood, and
+the blood to fire again.  The very cavern that they knelt in seemed
+to sway.  Yasmini screamed and moaned.  She loosed King's hands
+to cover her own eyes.
+
+And as she did that King sank, like a sack half-empty and toppled
+over sidewise on the floor asleep.
+
+He neither dreamed nor was conscious of anything, but slept like
+a dead man, having fought against her mesmerism harder than he knew.
+
+Statesmen, generals, outlaws, all make their big mistakes and manage
+to recover.  Very nearly always it is an apparently little mistake
+that does most damage in the end, something unnoticeable at the time,
+that grows in geometrical proportion, minus instead of plus.
+
+Yasmini made her little mistake that minute in believing King was
+utterly mesmerized at last and utterly in her power.  Whereas in
+truth he was only weary.  It may be that she gave him orders in
+his sleep, after the accepted manner of mesmerists;  but if she did,
+they never reached him;  he was far too fast asleep.  He slept so
+deep and long that he was not conscious of men's voices, nor of
+being carried, nor of time, nor of anxiety, nor of anything.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI
+
+
+
+Wolf met wolf in the dawning day
+Where scent hung sweet over trodden clay,
+And square each stood in the jungle way
+Eyeing the other with ears laid back.
+Still were the watchers.  When foe greets foe
+The wisest are quietest.  Better to go--
+Who stays to watch trouble woos trouble!
+        But lo!
+They trotted together to hunt one doe,
+Eyeing each other with ears laid back.
+
+
+When King awoke he lay on a comfortable bed in a cave he had never
+yet seen, but there was no trace of Yasmini, nor of the men who
+must have carried him to it.  Barbaric splendor and splendor that
+was not by any means barbaric lay all about--tiger skins, ivory-legged
+chairs, graven bronze vases, and a yak-hair shawl worth a rajah's ransom.
+
+The cave was spacious and not gloomy, for there was a wide door,
+apparently unguarded, and another square opening cut in the rock
+to serve as a window.  Through both openings light streamed in like
+taut threads of Yasmini's golden hair--strings of a golden zither,
+on which his own heart's promptings played a tune.
+
+He had no idea how long he had slept, but judged from memory of
+his former need of sleep and recogn-tion of his present freshness--
+and from the fact that it was a morning sun that shone through the
+openings--that he must have slept the clock round.
+ 
+It did not matter.  He knew it did not matter in the least.  He
+had no more plan than a mathematician has who starts to solve a
+problem, knowing that twice two is four in infinite combination.
+Like the mathematician, he knew that he must win.
+
+No man ever won a battle or conceived a stroke of statesmanship,
+no great deed was ever accomplished without a first taste of the
+triumphant foreknowledge, such as comes only to men who have digged
+hard, hewing to the line, loyal to first principles.  King had been
+loyal all his life.
+
+The difference between first principles and the other thing could
+hardly be better illustrated than by comparing Yasmini's position
+with his.  From her point of view he had no ground to stand on,
+unless he should choose to come and stand on hers.  She had men,
+ammunition, information.  He had what he stood in, and his only
+information had been poured into his ears for her ends.
+
+Yet his heart sang inside him now;  and he trusted it because that
+singing never had deceived him.  He did not believe she would have
+left him alone at that state of affairs unless through over-confidence.
+It is one of the absolute laws that over-confidence begets blindness
+and mistakes.
+
+She had staked on what seemed to her the certainty of India's rising
+at the first signal of a holy war.  She believed from close acquaintance
+that India was utterly disloyal, having made a study of disloyalty.
+And having read history she knew that many a conqueror has staked on
+such cards as hers, to win for lack of a better man to take the
+other side.
+
+But King had studied loyalty all his life, and he knew that besides
+being the home of money-lenders, thugs, and murderers, India is
+the very motherland of chivalry;  that besides sedition she breeds
+gentlemen with stout hearts;  that in addition to what one Christian
+Book calls "whoring after strange gods" India strives after purity.
+He knew that India's ideals are all imperishable, and her crimes
+but a kaleidoscopic phase.
+
+Not that he was analyzing thoughts just then.  He was listening
+to the still small voice that told him half of his purpose was
+accomplished.  He had probed Khinjan Caves, and knew the whole
+purpose for which the lawless thousands had been gathering and were
+gathering still.  Remained, to thwart that purpose.  And he had no
+more doubt of there being a means to thwart it than a mathematician
+has of the result of two times two, applied.
+
+Like a mathematician, he did not waste time and confuse issues by
+casting too far ahead, but began to devote himself steadily to the
+figures nearest.  Knots are not untied by wholesale, but are conquered
+strand by strand.  He began at the beginning, where he stood.
+
+He became conscious of human life near by and tip-toed to the door
+to look.  A six-foot ledge of smooth rock ended just at the door
+and sloped in the other direction sharply downward toward another
+opening in the cliff side, three or four hundred yards away and
+two hundred feet lower down.
+
+Behind him in a corner at the back of the cave was a narrow fissure,
+hung with a leather curtain, that was doubtless the door into Khinjan's
+heart;  but the only way to the outer air was along that ledge above
+a dizzying precipice, so high that the huge waterfall looked like
+a little stream below.  He was in a very eagle's aerie;  the upper rim
+of Khinian's gorge seemed not more than a quarter of a mile above him.
+
+Round the corner, ten feet from the entrance, stood a guard, armed
+to the teeth, with a rifle, a sword, two pistols and a long curved
+Khyber knife stuck handy in his girdle.  He spoke to the man and
+received no answer.  He picked up a splinter of rock and threw it.
+The fellow looked at him then.  He spoke again.  The man transferred
+his rifle to the other hand and made signs with his free fingers.
+King looked puzzled.  The man opened his mouth and showed that his
+tongue was missing.  He had been made dumb, as pegs are made to fit
+square holes.  King went in again, to wait on events and shudder.
+
+Nor did he have long to wait.  There came a sound of grunting, up
+the rock path.  Then footsteps.  Then a hoarse voice, growling orders.
+He went out again to look, and beheld a little procession of women,
+led by a man.  The man was armed, but the women were burdened with
+his own belongings--the medicine chest--his saddle and bridle--his
+unrifled mule-pack--and, wonder of wonders! the presents Khinjan's
+sick had given him, including money and weapons.  They came past
+the dumb man on guard and laid them all at King's feet just inside
+the cave.
+
+He smiled, with that genial, face-transforming smile of his that
+has so often melted a road for him through sullen crowds.  But the
+man in charge of the women did not grin.  He was suffering.  He
+growled at the women, and they went away like obedient animals,
+to sit half-way down the ledge and await further orders.  He himself
+made as if to follow them, and the dumb man on guard did not pay
+much attention;  he let women and man pass behind him, stepping
+one pace forward toward the edge to make more room.  That was his
+last entirely voluntary act in this world.
+
+With a suddenness that disarmed all opposition the other humped
+himself against the wall and bucked into the dumb man's back,
+sending him, weapons and all, hurtling over the precipice.  With
+a wild effort to recover, and avenge himself, and do his duty, the
+victim fired his rifle, that was ready cocked.  The bullet struck
+the rock above and either split or shook a great fragment loose,
+that hurtled down after him, so that he and the stone made a race
+of it for the waterfall and the caverns into which the water tumbled
+thousands of feet away.  The other ruffian spat after him, and then
+walked back to where King stood.
+
+"Now heal me my boils!" he said, grinning at last, doubtless from
+pleasure at the prospect.  He was the same man who had stood on
+guard at the "guest-cave" when Ismail led King out to see the Cavern
+of Earth's Drink.
+
+The temptation was to fling the brute after his victim.  The
+temptation always is to do the wrong thing--to cap wrath with wrath,
+injustice with vengeance.  That way wars begin and are never ended.
+King beckoned him into the cave, and bent over the chest of medical
+supplies.  Then, finding the light better for his purpose at the
+entrance, he called the man back and made him sit down on the box.
+
+The business of lancing boils is not especially edifying in itself;
+but that particular minor operation probably saved India.  But for
+hope of it the man with boils would never have stood two turns on
+guard hand running and let the relief sleep on;  so he would not
+have been on duty when the message came to carry King's belongings
+to his new cave of residence.  There would have been no object in
+killing the dumb man and so there would have been an expert with
+a loaded rifle to keep Muhammad Anim lurking down the trail.
+
+Muhammad Anim came--like the devil to scotch King's faith.  He had
+followed the women with the loads.  He stood now, like a big bear
+on a mountain track, swaying his head from side to side six feet
+away from King, watching the boils succumb to treatment.  He grunted
+when the job was finished, and King jumped, nearly driving the lance
+into a new place in his patient's neck.
+
+"Let him go!" growled Muhammad Anim.  "Go thou!  Stand guard over
+the women until I come!"
+
+The mullah turned a rifle this way and that in his paws, like a
+great bear dancing.  The Mahsudi with a sore neck could have shot
+him perhaps, but there are men with whom only the bravest dare try
+conclusions.  In cold gray dawn it would have needed a martinet
+to make a firing squad do execution on Muhammad Anim, even with
+his hands tied and his back against a wall.  A man whose boils
+had just been lanced was no match for him at all, even in broad
+daylight.  The Hillman slunk away and did as he was told.
+
+"What meant thy message?" growled the mullah.  "There came a Pathan
+to me in the Cavern of Earth's Drink with word that yonder sits
+a hakim.  What of it?"
+
+King had almost forgotten the message he had sent to Muhammad Anim
+in the Cavern of Earth's Drink.  But that was not why his eyes
+looked past the mullah's now, nor why he did not answer.  The
+mullah did not look round, for he knew what was happening.
+
+The yery Orakzai Pathan who had sat next King in the Cavern of
+Earth's Drink, and who had carried the message for him, was creeping
+up behind the women and already had his rifle leveled at the man
+with boils.
+
+"Aye!" said the mullah, watching King's eyes.  "He has done well,
+and the road is clear!"
+
+The man with boils offered no fight.  He dropped his rifle and
+threw his hands up.  In a moment the Orakzai Pathan was in command
+of two rifles, holding them in one hand and nodding and making
+signs to King from among the women, whom be seemed to regard as
+his plunder too.  The women appeared supremely indifferent in any
+event.  King nodded back to him.  A friend is a friend in the "Hills,"
+and rare is the man who spares his enemy.
+
+"Why send that message to me?" asked Muhammad Anim.
+
+"Why not?" asked King.  "If none know where the hakim is, how
+shall the hakim earn a living?"
+
+"None comes to earn a living in the Hills," growled the mullah,
+swaying his head slowly and devouring King with cruel calculating
+eyes.  "Why art thou here?"
+
+"I slew a man," said King.
+
+"Thou liest!  It was my men who got the head that let thee in!
+Speak!  Why art thou here?"
+
+But King did not answer.         The mullah resumed.
+
+"He who brought me the message yesterday says he has it from another,
+who had it from a third, that thou art here because she plans a
+simultaneous rising in India, and thou art from the Punjab where
+the Sikhs all wait to rise.  Is that true?"
+
+"Thy man said it," answered King.
+
+"What sayest thou?" the mullah asked.
+
+"I say nothing," said King.
+
+"Then hear me!" said the mullah.  "Listen, thou."  But he did not
+begin to speak yet.  He tried to see past King into the cave and
+to peer about into the shadows.
+
+"Where is she?" he asked.  "Her man Rewa Gunga went yesterday, with
+three men and a letter to carry, down the Khyber.  But where is she?"
+
+So he had slept the clock round!  King did not answer.  He blocked
+the way into the cave and looked past the mullah at a sight that
+fascinated, as a serpent's eyes are said to fascinate a bird.  But
+the mullah, who knew perfectly well what must be happening, did
+not trouble to turn his head.
+
+The Orakzai Pathan crouched among the women, and the women grinned.
+The Mahsudi, having surrendered and considering himself therefore
+absolved from further responsibility at least for the present, spat
+over the precipice and fingered gingerly the sore place where his
+boils had been.  He yawned and dropped both hands to his side;  and
+it was at that instant that the Pathan sprang at him.
+
+With arms like the jaws of a vise he pinned the Mahsudi's to his side,
+and lifted him from off hs feet.  The fellow screamed, and the Pathan
+shouted "Ho!"  But he did no murder yet.  He let his victim grow
+fully conscious of the fate in store for him, holding him so that
+his frantic kicks were squandered on thin air.  He turned him slowly,
+until he was upside-down;  and so, perpendicular, face-outward, he
+hove him forward like a dead log.  He stood and watched his victim
+fall two or three thousand feet before troubling to turn and resume
+both rifles;  and it was not until then, as if he had been mentally
+conscious of each move, that the mullah turned to look, and seeing
+only one man nodded.
+ 
+"Good!" he grunted. "'Shabash!"' (Well done!)
+
+Then he turned his head to stare into King's face, with the scrutiny
+of a trader appraising loot.  Fire leaped up behind his calculating
+eyes.  And without a word passing between them, King knew that this
+man as well as Yasmini was in possession of the secret of the Sleeper.
+Perhaps he knew it first;  perhaps she snatched the keeping of the
+secret from him.  At all events he knew it and recognized King's
+likeness to the Sleeper, for his eyes betrayed him.  He began to
+stroke his beard monotonously with one hand.  The rifle, that he
+pretended to be holding, really leaned against his back and with
+the free hand he was making signals.
+
+King knew well he was making signals.  But he knew too that in
+Yasmini's power, her prisoner, he bad no chance at all of interfering
+with her plans.  Having grounded on the bottom of impotence, so
+to speak, any tide that would take him off must be a good tide.
+He pretended to be aware of nothing, and to be particularly unaware
+that the Pathan, with a rifle in each hand, was pretending to come
+casually up the path.
+
+In a minute he was covered by a rifle.  In another minute the
+mullah had lashed his hands.  In five minutes more the women were
+loaded again with his belongings and they were all half-way down
+the track in single file, the mullah bringing up the rear, descending
+backward with rifle ready against surprise, as if he expected Yasmini
+and her men to pounce out any minute to the rescue.
+
+They entered a tunnel and wound along it, stepping at short intervals
+over the bodies of three stabbed sentries.  The Pathan spurned them
+with his heel as he passed.  In the glare at the tunnel's mouth
+King tripped over the body of a fourth man and fell with his chin
+beyond the edge of a sheer precipice.
+
+They were on a ledge above the waterfall again, having come through
+a projection on the cliff's side, for Khinjan is all rat-runs and
+projections, like a sponge or a hornet's nest on a titanic scale.
+
+The Pathan laughed and came back to gather him like a sheaf of corn.
+The great smelly ruffian hugged him to himself as he set him on
+his feet.
+
+"Ah!  Thou hakim!" he grinned.  "There is no pain in my shoulder
+at all!  Ask of me another favor when the time comes!  Hey, but I
+am sick of Khinjan!"
+
+He gave King a shove along the path in the general direction of
+the mullah.  Then he seized the dead body by the legs, and hurled
+it like a sling shot, watching it with a grin as it fell in a wide
+parabola.  After that he took the dead man's rifle, and those of
+the three other dead men, that he had hidden in a crevice in the
+rock, and loaded them all on a woman in addition to King's saddle
+that she carried already.
+
+"Come!" he said.  "Hurry, or Bull-with-a-beard yonder will remember
+us again.  I love him best when he forgets!"
+
+They soon reached another cave, at which the mullah stopped.  It
+was a dark ill-smelling hole, but he ordered King into it and the
+Pathan after him on guard, after first seeing the women pile all
+their loads inside.  Then he took the women away and went off
+muttering to himself, swaggering, swinging his right arm as he
+strode, in a way few natives do.
+
+"Let us hope he has forgotten these!" the Pathan grinned, touching
+the pile of rifles.  "Weight for weight in silver they will bring
+me a fine price!  He may forget.  He dreams.  For a mullah he
+cares less for meat and money than any I ever saw.  He is mad,
+I think.  It is my opinion Allah touched him!"
+
+"What is that, under thy shirt?" King asked.
+
+The Pathan grinned, and undid the button.  There was a second
+shirt underneath, and to that on the left breast were pinned two
+British medals.
+
+"Oh, yes!" be laughed.  "I served the raj!  I was in the army
+eleven years."
+
+"Why did you leave it?" King asked, remembering that this man loved
+to hear his own voice.
+
+"Oh, I had furlough, and the bastard who stood next me in the ranks
+was the son of a dog with whom my father had a blood-feud.  The
+blind fool did not know me.  He received his furlough on the same
+day as I.  I would not lay finger on him that side of the border,
+for we ate the same salt.  I knifed him this side the border.  It
+was no affair, of the British.  But I was seen, and I fled.  And
+having slain a man, and having no doubt a report had gone back to
+the regiment, I entered this place.  Except for a raid now and
+then to cool my blood I have been here ever since.  It is a devil
+of a place."
+
+Now the art of ruling India consists not in treading barefooted
+on scorpions--not in virtuous indignation at men who know no better--
+but in seeking for and making much of the gold that lies ever amid
+the dross.  There is gold in the character of any man who once
+passed the grilling tests before enlistment in a British-Indian
+regiment.  It may need experience to lay a finger on it, but it
+is surely there.
+
+"I heard," said King, "as I came toward the Khyber in great haste
+(for the police were at my heels)--"
+
+"Ah, the police!" the Pathan grinned pleasantly.
+
+The inference was that at some time or other he had left his mark
+on the police.
+
+"I heard," said King, "that men are flocking back to their old regiments."
+
+"Aye, but not men with a price on their heads, little hakim!"
+
+"I could not say," said King.  To seem to know too much is as bad
+as to drink too much.  "But I heard say that the sirkar has offered
+pardons to all deserters who return."
+
+"Hah!  The sirkar must be afraid.  The sirkar needs men!"
+
+"For myself," said King, "a whole skin in the 'Hills' seems better
+than one full of bullet holes in India."
+
+"Hah!  But thou art a hakim, not a soldier!"
+
+"True!" said King.
+
+"Tell me that again!  Free pardons?  Free pardons for all deserters?"
+
+"So I heard."
+
+"Ah!  But I was seen to slay a man of my own regiment."
+
+"On this side the border or that?" asked King artfully.
+
+"On this side."
+
+"Ah, but you were seen."
+
+"Ay!  But that is no man's business.  In India I earned in my salt.
+I obeyed the law.  There is no law here in the 'Hills.'  I am minded
+to go back and seek that pardon!  It would feel good to stand in
+the rank again, with a stiff-backed sahib out in front of me, and
+the thunder of the gun-wheels going by.  The salt was good!  Come
+thou with me!"
+
+"The pardon is for deserters," King objected, "not for political
+offenders."
+ 
+"Haugh!" said the Pathan, bringing down his flat hand hard on the
+hakim's thigh.  "I will attend to that for thee.  I will obtain my
+pardon first.  Then will I lead thee by the hand to the karnal sahib
+and lie to him and say, 'This is the one who persuaded me against
+my will to come back to the regiment!"'
+
+"And he will believe?  Nay, I would be afraid!" said King.
+
+"Would a pardon not be good?" the Pathan asked him.  "A pardon and
+leave to swagger through the bazaars again and make trouble with
+the daughters and wives of fat traders--a pardon--Allah!  It would
+be good to salute the karnal sahib again and see him raise a finger,
+thus; and to have the captain sahib call me a scoundrel--or some
+worse name if he loves me very much, for the English are a
+strange race--"
+
+"Thou art a dreamer!" said King. "Untie my hands;  the thong cuts me."
+The Pathan obeyed.
+
+"Dreamer, am I?  It is good to dream such dreams.  By Allah, I've
+a mind to see that dream come true!  I never slew a man on Indian
+soil, only in these 'Hills.'  I will go to them and say 'Here I am!
+I am a deserter.  I seek that pardon!'  'Truly I will go!  Come
+thou with me, little hakim!"
+
+"Nay," said King, "I have another thought."
+
+"What then?"
+
+"You, who were seen to slay a man a yard this side of the border--"
+
+"Nay;  half a mile this side!"
+
+"Half a mile, then.  You who were seen to slay a fellow soldier
+of your regiment, and I who am a political offender, do not win
+pardons so easily as that"
+
+"Would they hang us?"
+
+That was the first squeamishness the Pathan had shown of any kind,
+but men of his race would rather be tortured to death than hanged
+in a merciful hempen noose.
+
+"They would hang us," said King, "unless we came bearing gifts."
+
+"Gifts?  Has Allah touched thee?  What gifts should we bring?  A
+dozen stolen rifles?  A bag of silver?  And I am the dreamer, am I?"
+
+"Nay," said King. "I am the dreamer.  I have seen a good vision."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"There are others in these Hills--others in Khinjan who wear
+British medals?"
+
+The Pathan nodded.
+
+"How many?" asked King.
+
+"Hundreds.  Men fight first on one side, then on the other, being
+true to either side while the contract lasts.  In all there must
+be the makings of many regiments among the 'Hills.' "
+
+King nodded.  He himself had seen the chieftains come to parley
+after the Tirah war.  Most of them had worn British medals and had
+worn them proudly.
+
+"If we two," he said, speaking slowly, "could speak with some of
+those men and stir the spirit in them and persuade them to feel
+as thou dost, mentioning the pardon for deserters and the probability
+of bonuses to the time-expired for reenlistment;  if we could march
+down the Khyber with a hundred such, or even with fifty or with
+twenty-five or with a dozen men--we would receive our pardon for
+the sake of service rendered."
+
+"Good!"
+ 
+The Pathan thumped him on the back so hard that his eyes watered.
+
+"We would have to use much caution," King advised him, when he was
+able to speak again.
+
+"Aye!  If Bull-with-a-beard got wind of it be would have us crucified.
+And if she heard of it--"
+
+He was silent.  Apparently there were no words in his tongue that
+could compass his dread of her revenge.  He was silent for ten minutes,
+and King sat still beside him, letting memory of other days do its
+work--memory of the long, clean regimental lines, and of order and
+decency and of justice handed out to all and sundry by gentlemen who
+did not think themselves too good to wear a native regiment's uniform.
+
+"In two days I could do the drill again as well as ever," he said
+at last.         Then there was silence again for fifteen minutes more.
+"I could always shoot," he murmured;  "I could always shoot."
+
+When Muhammad Anim came back they had both forgotten to replace
+the lashing on King's wrists, but the mullah seemed not to notice it.
+
+"Come!" he ordered, with a sidewise jerk of his great ugly head,
+and then stood muttering impatiently while they obeyed.
+
+He had twice the number of women with him, but none of them the same;
+and he had brought five ruffians to guard them, who pounced on the
+captured rifles and claimed one apiece, to the Pathan's loud-growled
+disgust.  Then the women were made to gather up King's belongings,
+and at a word from the mullah they started in single file--the
+mullah leading, then two men, then King, then the Orakzai Pathan,
+and then the other three.  The Pathan began to whisper busily to
+the man next behind and noticing that King looked straight forward
+and contented himself;  his heart was singing within him unexplainedly;
+he wanted to sing and dance, as once David did before the ark.  He
+did not feel in the least like a prisoner.
+
+They marched downward through interminable tunnels and along ledges
+poised between earth and heaven, until they came at last to the
+tunnel leading to the one entrance into Khinjan Caves.  Just before
+they entered it two more of the mullah's men came up with them,
+leading horses.  One horse was for the mullah, and they helped King
+mount the other, showing him more respect than is usually shown a
+prisoner in the "Hills."
+
+Then the mullah led the way into the tunnel, and he seemed in deadly
+fear.  The echo of the hoof-beats irritated him.  He eyed each hole
+in the roof as if Yasmini might be expected to shoot down at him
+or drench him with boiling oil and hurried past each of them at a
+trot, only to draw rein immediately afterward because the noise
+was too great.
+
+It became evident that his men had been at work here too, for at
+intervals along the passage lay dead bodies.  Yasmini must have
+posted the men there, but where was she?  Each of them lay dead
+with a knife wound in his back, and the mullah's men possessed
+themselves of rifles and knives and cartridges, wiping off blood
+that had scarcely cooled yet.
+
+When they came to the end of the tunnel it was to find the door
+into the mosque open in front of them, and twenty more of Muhammad
+Anim's men standing guard over the eyelashless mullah.  They had
+bound and gagged him.  At a word from Muhammad Anim they loosed him;
+and at a threat the hairless one gave a signal that brought the
+great stone door sliding forward on its oiled bronze grooves.
+
+Then, with a dozen jests thrown to the hairless one for consolation,
+and an utter indifference to the sacredness of the mosque floor,
+they sought outer air, and Muhammad Anim led them up the Street
+of the Dwellings toward Khinian's outer ramparts.  They reached
+the outer gate without incident and hurried into the great dry
+valley beyond it.  As they rode across the valley the mullah thumbed
+a long string of beads.  Unlike Yasmini, he was praying to one god;
+but he seemed to have many prayers.  His back was a picture of
+determined treachery--the backs of his men were expressions of the
+creed that "He shall keep who can!"  King rode all but last now
+and had a good view of their unconsciously vaunted blackguardism.
+There was not a hint of honor or tenderness among the lot, man,
+woman or mullah.  Yet his heart sang within him as if he were
+riding to his own marriage feast!
+
+Last of all, close behind him, marched his friend, the Orakzai Pathan,
+and as they picked their way among the boulders across the mile-wide
+moat the two contrived to fall a little to the rear.  The Pathan
+began speaking in a whisper and King, riding with lowered head as
+if he were studying the dangerous track, listened with both ears.
+
+"She sent her man Rewa Gunga toward the Khyber with a message,"
+he whispered.  "He took a few men with him, and he is to send them
+with the message when they reach the Khyber, but he is to come back.
+All he went for is to make sure the message is not intercepted,
+for Bull-with-a-beard is growing reckless these days.  He knew what
+was doing and said at once that she is treating with the British,
+but there were few who believed that.  There are more who wonder
+where she hides while the message is on its way.  None has seen her.
+Men have swarmed into the Cavern of Earth's Drink and howled for her,
+but she did not come.  Then the mullah went to look for his ammunition
+that he stored and sealed in a cave.  And it was gone.  It was all
+gone.  And there was no proof of who had taken it!
+
+"Hakim, there be some who say--and Bull-with-a-beard is one of them--
+that she is afraid and hides.  Men say she fears vengeance for the
+stolen ammunition, because it was plenty for a conquest of India.
+So men say.  So say these here, for I have asked them."
+
+"And thou?" asked King, struggling to keep the note of exultation
+from his voice.  He did not believe she was hiding.  She might be
+staring into a crystal in
+some secret cave--she might be planning new mischief of any kind.
+But afraid she was surely not.  And just as surely he could vow
+she was working out her own undoing.
+
+"I?" said the Pathan.  "I swear she is afraid of nothing.  If she
+has taken all the ammunition, then we shall hear from it again and
+from her too!"
+
+"And what of me?" asked King.  "What will the mullah do with me?"
+
+"His men say he is desperate.  His own are losing faith in him.  He
+snatched thee to be a bait for her, having it in mind that a man
+whom she hides in her private part of Khinjan must be of great value
+to her.  He has sworn to have thee skinned alive on a hot rock should
+she fail to come to terms!"
+
+That being not such a comforting reflection, King rode in silence
+for a while, with the Pathan trudging solemnly beside his stirrup
+keeping semblance of guard over him.  When they reached the steep
+escarpment he had to dismount, although the mullah in the lead tried
+to make his own beast carry him up the lower spur and was mad--angry
+with his men for laughing when the horse fell back with him.
+
+Far in the rear King and the Pathan shoved and hauled and nearly
+lost their horse a dozen times at that.  But once at the top the
+mullah set a furious pace and the laden women panted in their efforts
+to keep up, the men taking less notice of them than if they had
+been animals.
+
+The march went on in single file until the sun died down in splendid
+fury.  Then there began to be a wind that they had to lean against,
+but the women were allowed no rest.
+
+At last at a place where the trail began to widen, the mullah
+beckoned King to ride beside him.  It was not that he wished to
+be communicative, but there were things King knew that he did not
+know, and he had his own way of asking questions.
+
+"Damned hakim!" he growled.  "Pill-man!  Poulticer!  That is a
+sweeper's trade of thine!  Thou shalt apply it at my camp!  I have
+some wounded and some sick."
+
+King did not answer, but buttoned his coat closer against the keen
+wind.  The mullah mistook the shudder for one of another kind.
+
+"Did she choose thee only for thy face?" he asked.  "Did she not
+consider thy courage?  Does she love thee well enough to ransom thee?"
+
+Again King did not answer, but he watched the mullah's face keenly
+in the dark and missed nothing of its expression.  He decided the
+man was in doubt---even racked by indecision.
+ 
+"Should she not ransom thee, hakim, thou shall have a chance to
+show my men how a man out of India can die!  By and by I will lend
+thee a messenger to send to her.  Better make the message clear
+and urgent!  Thou shalt state my terms to her and plead thine own
+cause in the same letter.  My camp lies yonder."
+
+He motioned with one sweep of his arm toward a valley that lay in
+shadow far below them.  As far as the slope leading down to it
+was visible in the moonlight it was littered with what the "Hills"
+call "hell-stones," that will neither lie flat nor keep on rolling,
+and are dangerous to man and beast alike.  Nothing else could be
+made out through the darkness but a few twisted tamarisk trees,
+that served to make the savagery yet more savage and the loneliness
+more desolate.  The gloom below the trees was that of the very
+underdepths of hell itself.
+
+The mullah pointed to a rock that rose like a shadow from the
+deeper blackness.
+
+"Yes," said King, "I have seen."  And the mullah stared at him.
+Then he shouted, and the top of the rock turned into a man, who
+gave them leave to advance, leaning on his rifle as one who had
+assured himself of their identity long minutes ago.
+
+As they approached it the rock clove in two and became two great
+pillars, with a man on each.  And between the pillars they looked
+down into a valley lit by fires that burned before a thousand hide
+tents, with shadows by the hundred flitting back and forth between
+them.  A dull roar, like the voice of an army, rose out of the gorge.
+
+"More than four thousand men!" said the mullah proudly.
+
+"What are four thousand for a raid into India?" sneered King,
+greatly daring.
+
+"Wait and see!" growled the mullah;  but he seemed depressed.
+
+He led the way downward, getting off his horse and giving the reins
+to a man.  King copied him, and part-way sliding, part stumbling
+down they found their way along the dry bed of a water-course between
+two spurs of a hillside, until they stood at last in the midst of
+a cluster of a dozen sentries, close to a tamarisk to which a man's
+body hung spiked.  That the man had been spiked to it alive was
+suggested by the body's attitude.
+
+Without a word to the sentries the mullah led on down a lane through
+the midst of the camp, toward a great open cave at the far side,
+in which a bonfire cast fitful light and shadow.  Watchers sitting
+by the thousand tents yawned at them, but took no particular notice.
+
+The mouth of the cave was like a lion's, fringed with teeth.  There
+were men in it, ten or eleven of them, all armed, squatting round
+the fire.
+
+"Get out!" growled the mullah.  But they did not obey.  They sat
+and stared at him.
+
+"Have ye tents?" the mullah asked, in a voice like thunder.
+
+"Aye!"  But they did not go yet.
+
+One of the men, he nearest the mullah, got on his feet, but he had
+to step back a pace, for the mullah would not give ground and their
+breath was in each other's faces.
+
+"Where are the bombs?  And the rifles?  And the many cartridges?"
+he demanded.  "We have waited long, Muhammad Anim.  Where are they
+now?"
+
+The others got up, to lend the first man encouragement.  They leaned
+on rifles and surrounded the mullah, so that King could only get
+a glimpse of him between them.  They seemed in no mood to be treated
+cavalierly--in no mood to be argued with.  And the Mullah did not argue.
+
+Ye dogs!" he growled at them, and he strode througli them to the
+fire and chose himself a good, thick burning brand.  "Ye sons of
+nameless mothers!"
+
+Then he charged them suddenly, beating them over head and face and
+shoulders, driving them in front of him, utterly reckless of their
+rifles.  His own rifle lay on the ground behind him, and King kicked
+its stock clear of the fire.
+
+"Oh, I shall pray for you this night!" Muhammad Anim snarled.  "What
+a curse I shall beg for you!  Oh, what a burning of the bowels ye
+shall have!  What a sickness!  What running of the eyes!  What sores!
+What boils!  What sleepless nights and faithless women shall be yours!
+What a prayer I will pray to Allah!"
+
+They scattered into outer gloom before his rage, and then came
+back to kneel to him and beg him withdraw his curse.  He kicked
+them as they knelt and drove them away again.  Then, silhouetted
+in the cave mouth, with the glow of the fire behind him, he stood
+with folded arms and dared them shoot.  He lacked little in that
+minute of being a full-grown brute at bay.  King admired him, with
+reservations.
+
+After five minutes of angry contemplation of the camp he turned
+on a contemptuous heel and came back to the fire, throwing on more
+fuel from a great pile in a corner.  There was an iron pot in the
+embers.  He seized a stick and stirred the contents furiously, then
+set the pot between his knees and ate like an animal.  He passed
+the pot to King when he had finished, but fingers had passed too
+many times through what was left in it and the very thought of
+eating the mess made his gorge rise;  so King thanked him and set
+the pot aside.
+
+Then, "That is thy place!" Muhammad Anim growled, pointing over
+his shoulder to a ledge of rock, like a shelf in the far wall.
+There was a bed upon it, of cotton blankets stuffed with dry grass.
+King walked over and felt the blankets and found them warm from
+the last man who had lain there.  They smelt of him too.  He lifted
+them and laughed.  Taking the whole in both hands be carried it
+to the fire and threw it in, and the sudden blaze made the mullah
+draw away a yard;  but it did not make him speak.
+
+"Bugs!" King explained, but the mullah showed no interest.  He
+watched, however, as King went back to the bed, and subsequent
+proceedings seemed to fascinate him.
+
+Out of the chest that one of the women had set down King took soap.
+There was a pitcher of water between him and the fire;  he carried
+it nearer.  With an improvised scrubbing brush of twigs he proceeded
+to scrub every inch of the rock-shelf, and when he had done and
+had dried it more or less, he stripped and began to scrub himself.
+
+"Who taught thee thy squeamishness?" the mullah asked at last,
+getting up and coming nearer.  It was well that King's skin was
+dark (although it was many shades lighter than his face, that had
+been stained so carefully).  The mullah eyed him from head to foot
+and looked awfully suspicious, but something prompted King and he
+answered without an instant's hesitation.
+
+"Why ask a woman's questions?" he retorted.  "Only women ask when
+they know the answer.  When I watched thee with the firebrand a
+short while ago, oh, mullah, I mistook thee lor a man."
+
+The mullah grunted and began to tug his beard.  But King said no
+more and went on washing himself.
+
+"I forgot," said the mullah then, "that thou art her pet.  She
+would not love thee unless thy smell was sweet."
+
+"No," said King quite cheerfully--going it blind, for he did not
+know what had possessed him to take that line, but knew he might
+as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb  No, if I stank like
+thee she would not love me."
+
+The muhah snorted and went back to the fire, but he took King's
+cake of soap with him and sat examining it.
+
+"Tauba!" he swore suddenly as if he had made a gruesome discovery.
+"Such filthy stuff is made from the fat of pigs!"
+
+"Doubtless!" said King.  "That is why she uses it, and why I use it.
+She is a better Muhammadan than thou.  She would surely cleanse
+her skin with the fat of pigs!"
+
+"Thou art a shameless one!" said the mullah, shaking his head like
+a bear.
+
+"I am what Allah made me!" answered King, and then, for the sake
+of the impression, he went through the outward form of muslim prayer,
+spreading a mat and omitting none of the genuflections.  When he
+had finished he unfolded his own blankets that a woman had thrown
+down beside the chest and spread them carefully on the rock-shelf.
+But though he was allowed to climb up and lie there, he was not
+allowed to sleep--nor did he want to sleep--for more than an hour
+to come.
+
+The mullah came over from the fire again and stood beside him,
+glaring like a great animal and grumbling in his beard.
+
+"Does she surely love thee?" he asked at last, and King nodded,
+because he knew he was on the trail of information.
+
+"So thou art to ape the Sleeper in his bronze mail, eh?  Thou art
+to come to life, as she was said to come to life, and the two of
+you are to plunder India?  Is that it?"
+
+King nodded again, for a nod is less committal than a word;  and
+the nod was enough to start the mullah off again.
+
+"I saw the Sleeper and his bride before she knew of either!  It
+was I who let her into Khinjan!  It was I who told the men she is
+the 'Heart of the Hills' come to life!  She tricked me!  But this
+is no hour for bearing grudges.  She has a plan and I am minded
+to help."
+
+King lay still and looked up at him, sure that treachery was the
+ultimate end of any plan the mullah Muhammad Anim had.  India has
+been saved by the treachery of her enemies more often than ruined
+by false friends.  So has the world, for that matter.
+
+"A jihad when the right hour comes will raise the tribes," the
+mullah growled.  "She and thou, as the Sleeper and his mate, could
+work wonders.  But who can trust her?  She stole that head!  She
+stole all the ammunition!  Does she surely love thee?"
+
+King nodded again, for modesty could not help him at that juncture.
+Love and boastfulness go together in the "Hills."
+
+"She shall have thee back, then, at a price!"
+
+King did not answer.  His brown eyes watched the mullah's, and he
+drew his breath in little jerks, lest by breathing aloud he should
+miss one word of what, was coming.
+
+"She shall have thee back against Khinian and the ammunition!  She
+and thou shall have India, but I shall be the power behind you!
+She must give me Khinjan and the ammunition!  She must admit me
+to the inner caves, whence her damned guards expelled me.  I must
+have the reins in my two hands so!  Then, thou and she shall have
+the pomp and  glitter while I guide!"
+
+King did not answer.
+
+"Dost understand?"
+
+King murmured something unintelligible.
+
+"Otherwise, I and my men will storm Khinjan, and she and thou shall
+go down into Earth's Drink lashed together!"
+
+King shuddered, not because he felt afraid, but because some
+instinct told him to make the mullah think him afraid.  He was far
+too interested to be fearful.
+
+"Ye shall both be tortured before the plunge into the river!  She
+shall be tortured in the Cavern of Earth's Drink before the men!"
+
+King shuddered again, this time without an effort.  He could imagine
+the thousands watching grimly while the flayer used his knife.
+
+"I have men in Khinjan!  I have as many as she!  On the day I march
+there will be a revolt within.  She would better agree to terms!"
+
+King lay looking at him, like a prisoner on the rack undergoing
+examination.  He did not answer.
+
+"Write thou a letter.  Since she loves thee, state thine own case
+to her.  Tell her that I hold thee hostage, and that Khinjan is
+mine already for a little fighting.  In a month she can not pick
+out my men from among her own.  Her position is undermined.  Tell
+her that.  Tell her that if she obeys she shall have India and be
+queen.  If she disobeys, she shall die in the Cavern of Earth's Drink!"
+
+"She is a proud woman, mullah," answered King.  "Threats to such
+as she--?"
+
+The mullah mumbled and strode back and forth three times between
+King's bed and the fire, with his fists knotted together behind
+him and his head bent, as Napoleon used to walk.  When he stood
+beside the bed again at last it was with his mind made up, as his
+clenched fists and his eyes indicated.
+
+"Make thine own terms with her!" be growled.  "Write the letter
+and send it!  I hold thee;  she holds Khinjan and the ammunition.
+I am between her and India.  So be it.  She shall starve in there!
+She shall lie in there until the war is over and take what terms
+are offered her in the end!  Write thine own letter!  State the case,
+and bid her answer!"
+
+"Very well," said King.  He began to see now definitely how India
+was to be saved.  It was none of his business to plan yet, but to
+help others' plans destroy themselves and to sow such seed in the
+broken ground as might bear fruit in time.
+
+The mullah left him, to squat and gaze into the fire, and mutter,
+and King lay still.  After a while the mullah went and carried a
+great water bowl nearer to the fire and, as King had done, stripped
+himself.  Then he heaped great fagots on the fire--wasteful fagots,
+each of which had cost some woman hours of mountain climbing.  And
+in the glow of the leaping flame he scrubbed himself from head to
+foot with King's soap.  Finally, with a feat of strength that nearly
+forced an exclamation out of King, he lifted the great water bowl
+in both hands and emptied the whole contents over himself.  Then
+be resumed his smelly garments without troubling to dry his body,
+and got out a Quran from a corner and began to read it in a nasal
+singsong that would have kept dead men awake.  King lay and watched
+and listened.
+
+Reading scripture only seemed to fire the mullah's veins.  For
+him sleep was either out of reach or despicable, perhaps both.
+He seemed in a mood to despise anything but conquest and strode
+back and forth up and down the cave like a caged bear, muttering
+to himself.
+
+After a time he went to the mouth of the cave, to stand and stare
+out at the camp where the thousand fires were dying fitfully and
+wood smoke purged the air of human nastiness.  The stars looked
+down on him, and he seemed to try to read them, standing with fists
+knotted together at his back.
+
+And as he stood so, six other mullahs came to him and began to
+argue with him in low tones, he browbeating them all with furious
+words hissed between half-closed teeth.  They were whispering still
+when King fell asleep.  It was courage, not carelessness, that let
+him sleep--courage and a great hope born of the mullah's perplexity.
+
+He dreamed that he was writing, writing, writing, while the torturers
+made a hot fire ready in the Cavern of Earth's Drink and whetted
+knives on the bridge end while the organ played The Marseillaise.
+He dreamed Yasmini came to him and whispered the solution to it all,
+but what she whispered he could not catch, although she whispered
+the same words again and again and seemed to be angry with him for
+not listening.
+
+And when he awoke at last he had fragments of his blanket in either
+hand, and the sun was already shining into the jaws of the cave.
+The camp was alive and reeked of cooking food.  But the mullah was
+gone, and so was all the money the women had brought, together with
+his medicines and things from Khinjan.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII
+
+
+
+When the last evil jest has been made, and the rest
+Of the ink of hypocrisy spilt,
+When the awfully right have elected to fight
+Lest their own should discover their guilt;
+When the door has been shut on the "if" and the "but"
+And it's up to the men with the guns,
+On their knees in that day let diplomatists pray
+For forgiveness from prodigal sons.
+
+
+Instead of the mullah, growling texts out of a Quran on his lap,
+the Orakzai Pathan sat and sunned himself in the cave mouth, emitting
+worldlier wisdom unadulterated with divinity.  As King went toward
+him to see to whom he spoke he grinned and pointed with his thumb,
+and King looked down on some sick and wounded men who sat in a crowd
+together on the ramp, ten feet or so below the cave.
+
+They seemed stout soldierly fellows.  Men of another type were
+being kept at a distance by dint of argument and threats.  Away
+in the distance was Muhammad Anim with his broad back turned to
+the cave, in altercation with a dozen other mullahs.  For the time
+he was out of the reckoning.
+
+"Some of these are wounded," the Pathan explained.  "Some have sores.
+Some have the belly ache.  Then again, some are sick of words, hot
+and cold by day and night.  All have served in the army.  All have
+medals.  All are deserters, some for one reason, some for another
+and some for no reason at all.  Bull-with-a-beard looks the other way.
+Speak thou to them about the pardon that is offered!"
+
+So King went down among them, taking some of the tools of his
+supposed trade with him and trying to crowd down the triumph that
+would well up.  The seed he had sown had multiplied by fifty in a
+night.  He wanted to shout, as men once did before the walls of Jericho.
+
+A man bared a sword cut.  He bent over him, and if the mullah had
+turned to look there would have been no ground for suspicion.  So
+in a voice just loud enough to reach them all, he repeated what
+he had told the Pathan the day before.
+
+"But who art thou?" asked one of them suspiciously.  Perhaps there
+had been a shade too much cocksureness in the hakim's voice, but
+he acted faultlessly when he answered.  Voice, accent, mannerism,
+guilty pride, were each perfect.
+
+"Political offender.  My brother yonder in the cave mouth"--(The
+Pathan smirked.  He liked the imputation)--"suggested I seek pardon,
+too.  He thinks if I persuade many to apply for pardon then the
+sirkar may forgive me for service rendered."
+
+The Pathan's smirk grew to a grin.  He liked grandly to have the
+notion fathered on himself;  and his complacency of course was
+suggestive of the hakim's trustworthiness.  But the East is
+ever cautious.
+
+"Some say thou art a very great liar," remarked a man with half
+a nose.
+
+"Nay," answered King.  "Liar I may be, but I am one against many.
+Which of you would dare stand alone and lie to all the others?
+Nay, sahibs, I am a political offender, not a soldier!"
+ 
+They all laughed at that and seizing the moment when they were in
+a pliant mood the Orakzai Pathan proceeded to bring proposals to
+a head.
+
+"Are we agreed?" he asked.  "Or have we waggled our beards all
+night long in vain?  Take him with us, say I.  Then, if pardons
+are refused us he at least will gain nothing by it.  We can plunge
+our knives in him first, whatever else happens."
+
+"Aye!"
+
+That was reasonable and they approved in chorus.  Possibility of
+pardon and reinstatement, though only heard of at second hand,
+had brought unity into being.  And unity brought eagerness.
+
+"Let us start to-night!" urged one man, and nobody hung back.
+
+"Aye!  Aye!  Aye!" they chorused.  And eagerness, as always in the
+"Hills," brought wilder counsel in its wake.
+
+"Who dare stab Bull-with-a-beard?  He has sought blood and has let
+blood.  Let him drink his own."
+
+"Aye!"
+
+"Nay!  He is too well guarded."
+
+"Not he!"
+
+"Let us stab him and take his head with us;  there well may be a
+price on it."
+
+They took a vote on it and were agreed;  but that did not suit King
+at all, whatever Muhammad Anim's personal deserts might be.  To
+let him be stabbed would be to leave Yasmini without a check on
+her of any kind, and then might India defend herself!  Yet to leave
+the mullah and Yasmini both at large would be almost equally dangerous,
+for they might form an alliance.  There must be some other way,
+and he set out to gain time.
+
+"Nay, nay, sahibs!" he urged.  "Nay, nay!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Sahibs, I have wife and children in Lahore.  Same are most dear
+to me and I to them.  I find it expedient to make great effort for
+my pardon.  Ye are but fifty.  Ye are less than fifty.  Nay, let
+us gather a hundred men."
+
+"Who shall find a hundred?" somebody demanded, and there was a
+chorus of denial.  "We be all in this camp who ate the salt."
+
+It was plain, though, that his daring to hold out only gave them
+the more confidence in him.
+
+"But Khinjan," he objected.  The crimes of the Khinjan men were
+not to the point.  Time had to be gained.
+
+"Aye," they agreed.  "There be many in Khinjan!"  Mere mention of
+the place made them regard Orakzai Pathan and hakim with new respect,
+as having right of entry through the forbidden gate.
+
+"Then I have it!" the Pathan announced at once, for he was awake
+to opportunity.  "Many of you can hardly march.  Rest ye here and
+let the hakim treat your belly aches.  Bull-with-a-beard bade me
+wait here for a letter that must go to Khinjan to-day.  Good.  I
+will take his letter.  And in Khinjan I will spread news about pardons.
+It is likely there are fifty there who will dare follow me back,
+and then we shall march down the Khyber like a full company of the
+old days!  Who says that is not a good plan?"
+
+There were several who said it was not, but they happened to have
+nothing the matter with them and could have marched at once.  The
+rest were of the other way of thinking and agreed in asserting
+that Khinjan men were a higher caste of extra-ultra murderers
+whose presence doubtless would bring good luck to the venture.
+These prevailed after considerable argument.
+
+Strangely enough, none of them deemed the proposition beneath Khinjan
+men's consideration.  Pardon and leave to march again behind British
+officers loomed bigger in their eyes than the green banner of the
+Prophet, which could only lead to more outrageous outlawry.  They
+knew Khinjan men were flesh and blood--humans with hearts--as well
+as they.  But caution had a voice yet.
+
+"She will catch thee in Khinjan Caves," suggested the man with part
+of his nose missing.  "She will have thee flayed alive!"
+
+"Take note then, I bequeath all the women in the world to thee!
+Be thou heir to my whole nose, too, and a blessing!" laughed the
+Pathan, and the butt of the jest spat savagely.  In the "Hills"
+there is only one explanation given as to how one lost his nose,
+and they all laughed like hyenas until the mullah Muhammad Anim
+came rolling and striding back.
+
+By that time King had got busy with his lancet, but the mullah
+called him off and drove the crowd away to a distance;  then be
+drove King into the cave in front of him, his mouth working as if
+he were biting bits of vengeance off for future use.
+
+"Write thy letter, thou!  Write thy letter!  Here is paper.  There
+is a pen--take it!  Sit!  Yonder is ink--ttutt--ttutt!--Write,
+now, write!"
+
+King sat at a box and waited, as if to take dictation, but the
+mullah, tugging at his beard, grew furious.
+
+"Write thine own letter!  Invent thine own argument!  Persuade her,
+or die in a new way!  I will invent a new way for thee!"
+
+So King began to write, in Urdu, for reasons of his own.  He had
+spoken once or twice in Urdu to the mullah and had received no answer.
+At the end of ten minutes he handed up what he had written, and
+Muhammad Anim made as if to read it, trying to seem deliberate,
+and contriving to look irresolute.  It was a fair guess that be
+hated to admit ignorance of the scholars' language.
+
+"Are there any alterations you suggest?" King asked him.
+
+"Nay, what care I what the words are?  If she be not persuaded,
+the worse for thee!"
+
+He held it out, and as he took it King contrived to tear it;  he
+also contrived to seem ashamed of his own clumsiness.
+
+"I will copy it out again," he said.
+
+The mullah swore at him, and conceiving that some extra show of
+authority was needful, growled out:
+
+"Remember all I said.  Set down she must surrender Khinjan Caves
+or I swear by Allah I will have thee tortured with fire and thorns--
+and her, too, when the time comes!"
+
+Now he had said that, or something very like it, in the first letter.
+There was no doubt left that the Mullah was trying to hide ignorance,
+as men of that fanatic ambitious mold so often will at the expense
+of better judgment.  If fanatics were all-wise, it would be a poor
+world for the rest.
+ 
+"Very well," King said quietly.  And with great pretense of copying
+the other letter out on fresh paper he now wrote what he wished to say,
+taking so long about it (for he had to weigh each word), that the
+mullah strode up and down the cave swearing and kicking things over.
+
+        "Greeting,"' he wrote, "to the most beautiful and very
+        wise Princess Yasmini, in her palace in the Caves in
+        Khinjan, from her servant Kurram Khan the hakim, in
+        the camp of the mullah Muhammad Anim, a night's march
+        distant in the hills.
+
+        "The mullah Muhammad Anim makes his stand and demands
+        now surrender to himself of Khinjan Caves; and of all
+        his ammunition.  Further, he demands full control of
+        you and of me and of all your men.  He is ready to
+        fight for his demands and already--as you must well
+        know--he has considerable following in Khinjan Caves.
+        He has at least as many men as you have, and he has
+        four thousand more here.
+
+        "He threatens as a preliminary to blockade Khinjan
+        Caves, unless the answer to this prove favorable,
+        letting none enter, but calling his own men out to
+        join him.  This would suit the Indian government,
+        because while the 'Hills' fight among themselves
+        they can not raid India, and while he blockades
+        Khinjan Caves there will be time to move against him.
+
+        "Knowing that he dares begin and can accomplish what
+        he threatens, I am sorry;  because I know it is said
+        how many services you have rendered of old to the
+        government I serve.  We who serve one raj are One--one
+        to remember--one to forget--one to help each other in
+        good time.
+
+        "I have not been idle.  Some of Muhammad Anim's men
+        are already mine.  With them I can return to India,
+        taking information with me that will serve my government.
+        My men are eager to be off.
+
+        "It may be that vengeance against me would seem sweeter
+        to you than return to your former allegiance.  In that
+        case, Princess, you only need betray me to the mullah,
+        and be sure my death would leave nothing to be desired
+        by the spectators.  At present he does not suspect me.
+
+        "Be assured, however, that not to betray me to him is
+        to leave me free to serve my government and well able
+        to do so.
+
+        "I invite you to return to India with me, bearing news
+        that the mullah Muhammad Anim and his men are bottled
+        in Khinjan Caves, and to plan with me to that end.
+
+        "If you will, then write an answer to Muhammad Anim,
+        not in Urdu, but in a language he can understand;  seem
+        to surrender to him.  But to me send a verbal message,
+        either by the bearer of this or by some trustier messenger.
+
+        "India can profit yet by your service if you will.  And
+        in that case I pledge my word to direct the government's
+        attention only to your good service in the matter.  It is
+        not yet too late to choose.  It is not impertinent in me
+        to urge you.
+
+        "Nor can I say how gladly I would subscribe myself your
+        grateful and loyal servant."
+
+The mullah pounced on the finished letter, pretended to read it,
+and watched him seal it up, smudging the hot wax with his own great
+gnarled thumb.  Then he shouted for the Orakzai Pathan, who came
+striding in, all grins and swagger.
+
+"There--take it!  Make speed!" he ordered, and with his rifle at
+the "ready" and the letter tucked inside his shirt, the Pathan
+favored King with a farewell grin and obeyed.
+
+"Get out!" the mullah snarled then immediately.  "See to the sick.
+Tell them I sent thee.  Bid them be grateful!"
+ 
+King went.  He recognized the almost madness that constituted the
+mullah's driving power.  It is contagious, that madness, until it
+destroys itself.  It had made several thousand men follow him and
+believe in him, but it had once given Yasmini a chance to fool him
+and defeat him, and now it gave King his chance.  He let the mullah
+think himself obeyed implicitly.
+
+He became the busiest man in all the "Hills."  While the mullah
+glowered over the camp from the cave mouth or fulminated from the
+Quran or fought with other mullahs with words for weapons and abuse
+for argument, he bandaged and lanced and poulticed and physicked
+until his head swam with weariness.
+
+The sick swarmed so around him that he had to have a body-guard
+to keep them at bay;  so he chose twenty of the least sick from
+among those who had talked with him after sunrise.
+
+And because each of those men had friends, and it is only human
+to wish one's friend in the same boat, especially when the sea,
+so to speak, is rough, the progress through the camp became a
+current of missionary zeal and the virtues of the Anglo-Indian raj
+were better spoken of than the "Hills" had heard for years.
+
+Not that there was any effort made to convert the camp en masse.
+Far from it.  But the likely few were pounced on and were told of
+a chance to enlist for a bounty in India.  And what with winter
+not so far ahead, and what with experience of former fighting
+against the British army, the choosing was none so difficult.  From
+the day when the lad first feels soft down upon his face until the
+old man's beard turns white and his teeth shake out, the Hillman
+would rather fight than eat;  but he prefers to fight on the winning
+side if he may, and he likes good treatment.
+
+Before if was dark that night there were thirty men sworn to hold
+their tongues and to wait for the word to hurry down the Khyber
+for the purpose of enlisting in some British-Indian regiment.  Some
+even began to urge the hakim not to wait for the Orakzai Pathan,
+but to start with what he had.
+
+"Shall I leave my brother in the lurch?" the hakim asked them;
+and though they murmured, they thought better of him for it.
+
+Well for him that he had plenty of Epsom salts in his kit, for in
+the "Hills" physic should taste evil and show very quick results
+to be believed in.  He found a dozen diseases of which he did not
+so much as know the name, but half of the sufferers swore they
+were cured after the first dose.  They would have dubbed him faquir
+and have foisted him to a pillar of holiness had he cared to let them.
+
+Muhammad Anim slept most of the day, like a great animal that
+scorns to live by rule.  But at evening he came to the cave mouth
+and fulminated such a sermon as set the whole camp to roaring.  He
+showed his power then.  The jihad he preached would have tempted
+dead men from their graves to come and share the plunder, and the
+curses he called down on cowards and laggards and unbelievers were
+enough to have frightened the dead away again.
+
+In twenty minutes he had undone all King's missionary work.  And
+then in ten more, feeling his power and their response, and being
+at heart a fool as all rogues are, he built it up again.
+
+He began to make promises too definite.  He wanted Khinjan Caves.
+More, he needed them.  So he promised them they should all be free
+of Khinjan Caves within a day or two, to come and go and live there
+at their pleasure.  He promised them they should leave their wives
+and children and belongings safe in the Caves while they themselves
+went down to plunder India.  He overlooked the fact that Khinjan
+Caves for centuries had been a secret to be spoken of in whispers,
+and that prospect of its violation came to them as a shock.
+
+Half of them did not believe him.  Such a thing was impossible, and
+if he were lying as to one point, why not as to all the others, too?
+
+And the army veterans, who had been converted by King's talk of
+pardons, and almost reconverted by the sermon, shook their heads
+at the talk of taking Khinjan.  Why waste time trying to do what
+never had been done, with her to reckon against, when a place in
+the sun was waiting for them down in India, to say nothing of the
+hope of pardons and clean living for a while?  They shook their
+heads and combed their beards and eyed one another sidewise in a
+way the "Hills" understand.
+
+That night, while the mullah glowered over the camp like a great
+old owl, with leaping firelight reflected in his eyes, the thousands
+under the skin tents argued, so that the night was all noise.  But
+King slept.
+
+All of another day and part of another night he toiled among the
+sick, wondering when a message would come back.  It was nearly
+midnight when he bandaged his last patient and came out into the
+starlight to bend his back straight and yawn and pick his way
+reeling with weariness back to the mullah's cave.  He had given
+his bag of medicines and implements to a man to carry ahead of
+him and had gone perhaps ten paces into the dark when a strong
+hand gripped him by the wrist.
+
+"Hush!" said a voice that seemed familiar.
+
+He turned swiftly and looked straight into the eyes of the Rangar
+Rewa Gunga!
+
+"How did you get here?" he asked in English.
+
+"Any fool could learn the password into this camp!  Come over here,
+sahib.  I bring word from her."
+
+The ground was criss-crossed like a man's palm by the shadows of
+tent-ropes.  The Rangar led him to where the tents were forty feet
+apart and none was likely to overhear them.  There he turned like
+a flash."
+
+"She sends you this!" he hissed."
+
+In that same instant King was fighting for his life.
+
+In another second they were down together among the tent-pegs,
+King holding the Rangar's wrist with both hands and struggling to
+break it, and the Rangar striving for another stroke.  The dagger
+he held had missed King's ribs by so little that his skin yet
+tingled from its touch.  It was a dagger with bronze blade and a
+gold hilt--her dagger.  It was her perfume in the air.
+
+They rolled over and over, breathing hard.  King wanted to think
+before he gave an alarm, and he could not think with that scent in
+his nostrils and creeping into his lungs.  Even in the stress of
+fighting be wondered how the Rangar's clothes and turban had come
+to be drenched in it.  He admitted to himself afterward that it
+was nothing else than jealousy that suggested to him to make the
+Rangar prisoner and hand him over to the mullah.
+
+That would have been a ridiculous thing to do, for it would have
+forced his own betrayal to the mullah.  But as if the Rangar had
+read his mind he suddenly redoubled his efforts and King, weary to
+the point of sickness, had to redouble his own or die.  Perhaps
+the jealousy helped put venom in his effort, for his strength came
+back to him as a madman's does.  The Rangar gave a moan and let
+the knife fall.
+
+And because jealousy is poison King did the wrong thing then.  He
+pounced on the knife instead of on the Rangar.  He could have
+questioned him--knelt on him and perhaps forced explanations from him.
+But with a sudden swift effort like a snake's the Rangar freed himself
+and was up and gone before King could struggle to his feet--gone
+like a shadow among shadows.
+
+King got up and felt himself all over, for they had fought on stony
+ground and he was bruised.  But bruises faded into nothing, and
+weariness as well, as his mind began to dwell on the new complication
+to his problem.
+
+It was plain that the moment he had returned from his message to
+the Khyber the Rangar had been sent on this new murderous mission.
+If Yasmini had told the truth a letter had gone into India describing
+him, King, as a traitor, and from her point of view that might be
+supposed to cut the very ground away from under his feet.
+
+Then why so much trouble to have him killed?  Either Rewa Gunga
+had never taken the first letter, or--and this seemed more probable--
+Yasniini had never believed the letter would be treated seriously
+by the authorities, and had only sent it in the hope of fooling
+him and undermining his determination.  In that case, especially
+supposing her to have received his ultimatum on the mullah's behalf
+before sending Rewa Gunga with the dagger, she must consider him
+at least dangerous.  Could she be afraid?  If so her game was
+lost already!
+
+Perhaps she saw her own peril.  Perhaps she contemplated--gosh!
+what a contingency!--perhaps she contemplated bolting into India
+with a story of her own, and leaving the mullah to his own devices!
+In such a case, before going she would very likely try to have the
+one man stabbed who could give her away most completely.  In fact,
+would she dare escape into India and leave himself alive behind her?
+
+He rather thought she would dare do anything.  And that thought
+brought reassurance.  She would dare, and being what she was she
+almost surely would seek vengeance on the mullah before doing
+anything else.
+
+Then why the dagger for himself?  She must believe him in league
+with the mullah against her.  She might believe that with him out
+of the way the mullah would prove an easier prey for her.  And that
+belief might be justifiable, but as an explanation it failed to satisfy.
+
+There was an alternative, the very thought of which made him fearfully
+uneasy, and yet brought a thrill with it.  In all eastern lands, love
+scorned takes to the dagger.  He had half believed her when she swore
+she loved him!  The man who could imagine himself loved by Yasmini
+and not be thrilled to his core would be inhuman, whatever reason
+and caution and caste and creed might whisper in imagination's wake.
+
+Reeling from fatigue (he felt like a man who had been racked, for
+the Rangar's strength was nearly unbelievable), he started toward
+where the mullah sat glowering in the cave mouth.  He found the
+man who had carried his bag asleep at the foot of the ramp, and
+taking the bag away from him, let him lie there.  And it took him
+five minutes to drag his hurt weary bones up the ramp, for the
+fight had taken more out of him than he had guegsed at first.
+
+The mullah glared at him but let him by without a word.  It was
+by the fire at the back of the cave, where he stooped to dip water
+from the mullah's enormous crock that the next disturbing factor
+came to light.  He kicked a brand into the fire and the flame leaped.
+Its light shone on a yard and a half of exquisitely fine hair, like
+spun gold, that caressed his shoulder and descended down one arm.
+One thread of hair that conjured up a million thoughts, and in a
+second upset every argument!
+
+If Rewa Gunga had been near enough to her and intimate enough with
+her not only to become scented with her unmistakable perfume but
+even to get her hair on his person, then gone was all imagination
+of her love for himself!  Then she had lied from first to last!
+Then she had tried to make him love her that she might use him,
+and finding she had failed, she had sent her true love with the
+dagger to make an end!
+
+In a moment he imagined a whole picture, as it might have been in
+a crystal, of himself trapped and made to don the Roman's armor
+and forced to pose to the savage "Hills'--or fooled into posing to
+them--as her lover, while Rewa Gunga lurked behind the scenes and
+waited for the harvest in the end.  And what kind of harvest?
+
+And what kind of man must Rewa Gunga be who could lightly let go
+all the prejudices of the East and submit to what only the West
+has endured hitherto with any complacency--a "tertium quid"?
+
+Yet what a fool he, King, had been not to appreciate at once that
+Rewa Gunga must be her ]over.  Why should he not be?  Were they
+not alike as cousins?  And the East does not love its contrary,
+but its complement, being older in love than the West, and wiser
+in its ways in all but the material.  He had been blind.  He had
+overlooked the obvious--that from first to last her plan had been
+to set herself and this Rewa Gunga on the throne of India!
+
+He washed and went through the mummery of muslim prayers for the
+watchful mullah's sake, and climbed on to his bed.  But sleep seemed
+out of the question.  He lay and tossed for an hour, his mind as
+busy as a terrier in hay.  And when be did fall asleep at last it
+was so to dream and mutter that the mullah came and shook him and
+preached him a half-hour sermon against the mortal sins that rob men
+of peaceful slumber by giving them a foretaste of the hell to come.
+
+All that seemed kinder and more refreshing than King's own thoughts
+had been, for when the mullah had done at last and had gone striding
+back to the cave mouth, he really did fall sound asleep, and it was
+after dawn when he awoke.  The mullah's voice, not untuneful was
+rousing all the valley echoes in the call to prayer.
+
+        Allah is Almighty!  Allah is Almighty!
+        I declare there is no God but Allah!
+        I declare Muhammad is his prophet!
+        Hie ye to prayer!
+        Hie ye to salvation!
+        Prayer is better than sleep!
+        Prayer is better than sleep!
+        There is no God but Allah!
+
+And while King knelt behind the mullah and the whole camp faced
+Mecca in forehead-in-the-dust abasement there came a strange procession
+down the midst--not strange to the "Hills," where such sights are
+common, but strange to that camp and hour.  Somebody rose and struck
+them, and they knelt like the rest;  but when prayer was over and
+cooking had begun and the camp became a place of savory smell, they
+came on again--seven blind men.
+
+They were weary, ragged, lean--seven very tatter-demalions--and the
+front man led them, tapping the ground with a long stick.  The
+others clung to him in line, one behind the other.  He was the only
+clean-shaven one, and he was the tallest.  He looked as if he had
+not been blind so long, for his physical health was better.  All
+seven men yelled at the utmost of their lungs, but he yelled the loudest.
+
+"Oh, the hakim--the good hakim!" they wailed.  "Where is the famous
+hakim?  We be blind men--blind we be--blind--blind!  Oh, pity us!
+Is any kismet worse than ours?  Oh, show us to the hakim!  Show us
+the way to him!  Lead us to him!  Oh, the famous, great, good hakim
+who can heal men's eyes!"
+
+The mullah looked down on them like a vulture waiting to see them
+die, and seeing they did not die, turned his back and went into
+his cave.  Close to the ramp they stopped, and the front man,
+cocking his head to one side as only birds and the newly blind do,
+gave voice again in nasal singsong.
+
+"Will none tell me where is the great, good, wise hakim Kurram Khan?"
+
+"I am he," said King, and he stepped down toward him, calling to
+an assistant to come and bring him water and a sponge.  The blind
+man's face looked strangely familiar, though it was partly disguised
+by some gummy stuff stuck all about the eyes.  Taking it in both
+hands be tilted the eyes to the light and opened one eye with his
+thumb.  There was nothing whatever the matter with it.  He opened
+the other.
+
+"Rub me an ointment on!" the man urged him, and he stared at the
+face again.
+
+"Ismail!" he said. "You?"
+
+"Aye!  Father of cleverness!  Make play of healing my eyes!"
+
+So King dipped a sponge in water and sent back for his bag and
+made a great show of rubbing on ointment.  In a minute Ismail,
+looking almost like a young man without his great beard, was dancing
+like a lunatic with both fists in the air, and yelling as if wasps
+had stung him.
+
+"Aieee--aieee--aieee!" he yelled.  "I see again!  I see!  My eyes
+have light in them!  Allah!  Oh, Allah heap riches on the great
+wise hakfim who can heal men's eyes!  Allah reward him richly, for
+I am a beggar and have no goods!"
+
+The other six blind men came struggling to be next, and while King
+rubbed ointment on their eyes and saw that there was nothing there
+he could cure the whole camp began to surge toward him to see the
+miracle, and his chosen body-guard rushed up to drive them back.
+
+"Find your way down the Khyber and ask for the Wilayti dakitar.  He
+will finish the cure."
+
+The six blind men, half-resentful, half-believing, turned away,
+mainly because Ismail drove them with words and blows.  And as they
+went a tall Afridi came striding down the camp with a letter for
+the mullah held out in a cleft stick in front of him.
+
+"Her answer!" said Ismail with a wicked grin.
+
+"What is her word?  Where is the Orakzai Pathan?"
+
+But Ismail laughed and would not answer him.  It seemed to King
+that he scented climax.  So did his near-fifty and their thirty
+friends.  He chose to take the arrival of the blind men as a hint
+from Providence and to "go it blind" on the strength of what he
+had hoped might happen.  Also he chose in that instant to force the
+mullah's hand, on the principle that hurried buffaloes will blunder.
+
+"To Khinjan!" he shouted to the nearest man.  "The mullah will march
+on Khinjan!"
+
+They murmured and wondered and backed away from him to give him room.
+Ismail watched him with dropped jaw and wild eye.
+
+"Spread it through the camp that we march on Khinjan!  Shout it!
+Bid them strike the tents!"
+
+Somebody behind took up the shout and it went across the camp in
+leaps, as men toss a ball.  There was a surge toward the tents,
+but King called to his deserters and they clustered back to him.
+He had to cement their allegiance now or fail altogether, and he
+would not be able to do it by ordinary argument or by pleading;
+he had to fire their imagination.  And he did.
+
+"She is on our side!"  That was a sheer guess.  "She has kept our
+man and sent another as hostage for him in token of good faith!
+Listen!  Ye saw this man's eyes healed.  Let that be a token!  Be
+ye the men with new eyes!  Give it out!  Claim the title and be
+true to it and see me guide you down the Khyber in good time like
+a regiment, many more than a hundred strong!"
+
+They jumped at the idea.  The "Hills"--the whole East, for that
+matter--are ever ready to form a new sect or join a new band or a
+new blood-feud.  Witness the Nikalseyns, who worship a long-since
+dead Englishman.
+
+"We see!" yelled one of them.
+
+"We see!" they chorused, and the idea took charge.  From that minute
+they were a new band, with a war-cry of their own.
+
+"To Khinjan!" they howled, scattering through the camp, and the
+mullah came out to glare at them and tug his beard and wonder what
+possessed them.
+
+"To Khinjan!" they roared at him.  "Lead us to Khinjan!"
+
+"To Khinjan, then!" he thundered, throwing up both arms in a sort
+of double apostolic blessing, and then motioning as if he threw
+them the reins and leave to gallop.  They roared back at him like
+the sea under the whip of a gaining wind.  And Ismail disappeared
+among them, leaving King alone.  Then the mullah's eyes fell on
+King and he beckoned him.
+
+King went up with an effort, for he ached yet from his struggle
+of the night before.  Up there by the ashes of the fire the mullah
+showed him a letter he had crumpled in his fist.  There were only
+a few lines, written in Arabic, which all mullahs are supposed to be
+able to read, and they were signed with a strange scrawl that might
+have meant anything.  But the paper smelt strongly of her perfume.
+
+"Come, then.  Bring all your men, and I will let you and them enter
+Khinjan Caves.  We will strike a bargain in the Cavern of Earth's Drink."
+
+That was all, but the fire in the mullah's eyes showed that he
+thought it was enough.  He did not doubt that once he should have
+his extra four thousand in the caves Khinjan would be his;  and
+he said so.
+
+"Khinjan is mine!" he growled.  "India is mine!"
+
+And King did not answer him.  He did not believe Yasmini would be
+fool enough to trust herself in any bargain with Muhammad Anim.  Yet
+he could see no alternative as yet.  He could only be still and be
+glad he had set the camp moving and so had forced the mullah's hand.
+
+"The old fatalist would have suspected her answer otherwise!" he
+told himself, for he knew that he himself suspected it.
+
+While he and the mullah watched the tents began to fall and the
+women labored to roll them.  The men began firing their rifles,
+and within the hour enough ammunition had been squandered to have
+fought a good-sized skirmish;  but the mullah did not mind, for
+he had Khinjan Caves in view, and none knew better than he what
+vast store of cartridges and dynamite was piled in there.  He let
+them waste.
+
+Watching his opportunity, King slipped down the ramp and into the
+crowd, while the mullah was busy with personal belongings in the
+cave.  King left his own belongings to the fates, or to any thief
+who should care to steal them.  He was safe from the mullah in the
+midst of his nearly eighty men, who half believed him a sending
+from the skies.
+
+"We see! we see!" they yelled and danced around him.
+
+Before ever the mullah gave an order they got under way and started
+climbing the steep valley wall.  The mullah on his brown mule thrust
+forward, trying to get in the lead, and King and his men hung back,
+to keep at a distance from him.  It was when the mullah had reached
+the top of the slope and was not far from being in the lead that
+Ismail appeared again, leading King's horse, that he had found in
+possession of another man.  That did not look like enmity or treachery.
+King mounted and thanked him.  Ismail wiped his knife, that had
+blood on it, and stuck his tongue through his teeth, which did not
+look quite like treachery either.  Yet the Afridi could not be got
+to say a word.
+
+Two or three miles along the top of the escarpment the mullah sent
+back word that he wanted the hakim to be beside him.  Doubtless
+he had looked back and had seen King on the horse, head and shoulders
+above the baggage.
+
+But King's men treated the messenger to open scorn and sent him packing.
+
+"Bid the mullah hunt himself another hakim!  Be thou his hakim!
+Stay, we will give thee a lesson in how to use a knife!"
+
+The man ran, lest they carry out their threat, for men joke grimly
+in the "Hills."
+
+Ismail came and held King's stirrup, striding beside him with the
+easy Hillman gait.
+
+"Art thou my man at last?" King asked him, but Ismail laughed and
+shook his head.
+
+"I am her man."
+
+"Where is she?" King asked.
+
+"Nay, who am I that I should know?"
+
+"But she sent thee?"
+
+"Aye, she sent me."
+
+"To what purpose?"'
+
+"To her purpose!" the Afridi answered, and King could not get
+another word out of him.  He fell behind.
+
+But out of the corner of his eye, and once or twice by looking
+back deliberately, King saw that Ismail was taking the members of
+his new band one by one and whispering to them.  What he said was
+a mystery, but as they talked each man looked at King.  And the
+more they talked the better pleased they seemed.  And as the day
+wore on the more deferential they grew.  By midday if King wanted
+to dismount there were three at least to hold his stirrup and ten
+to help him mount again.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVIII
+
+
+
+By the sweat of your brow;  by the ache of your bones;
+In the sun, in the wind, in the chill of the rains,
+Ye sowed as ye knew.  And ye know it was blown
+To be trodden and burned--aye, and that by your own
+Who sneered at lean furrows and mocked at the stones.
+But ye stayed and sowed on.  And a little remains.
+Ye shall have for your faith.  Ye shall reap for your pains.
+
+
+Four thousand men with women and children and baggage do not move
+so swiftly as one man or a dozen, especially in the "Hills," where
+discipline is reckoned beneath a proud man's honor.  There were
+many miles to go before Khinjan when night fell and the mullah bade
+them camp.  He bade them camp because they would have done it
+otherwise in any case.
+
+"And we," said King to his all but eighty who crowded around him,
+"being men with new eyes and with a great new hope in us, will
+halt here and eat the evening meal and watch for an opportunity."
+
+"Opportunity for what?" they asked him.
+
+"An opportunity to show how Allah loves the brave!" said King, and
+they had to be content with that, for he would say no more to them.
+Seeing he would not talk, they made their little fires all around
+him and watched while their women cooked the food.  The mullah would
+not let them eat until he and the whole camp had prayed like the
+only righteous.
+
+When the evening meal was eaten, and sentries had been set at every
+vantage point, and the men all sat about cleansing their beards
+and fingers the mullah sent for the hakim again.  Only this time
+he sent twenty men to fetch him.
+
+There was so nearly a fight that the skin all down King's back was
+gooseflesh, for a fight at that juncture would have ruined everything.
+At the least he would have been made a hopeless helpless prisoner.
+But in the end the mullah's men drew off snarling, and before they
+could have time to receive new orders or reinforcements, King's
+die was cast.
+
+There came another order from the mullah.  The women and children
+were to be left in camp next dawn, and to remain there until sent for.
+There was murmuring at that around the camp, and especially among
+King's contingent. But King laughed.
+
+"It is good!" he said.
+
+"Why?  How so?" they asked him.
+
+"Bid your women make for the Khyber soon after the mullah marches
+tomorrow.  Bid them travel down the Khyber until we and they meet!"
+
+"But--"
+
+"Please yourselves, sahibs!" The hakim's air was one of supremest
+indifference.  "As for me, I leave no women behind me in the mountains.
+I am content."
+
+They murmured a while, but they gave the orders to their women, and
+King watched the women nod.  And all that while Ismail watched him
+with carefully disguised concern, but undisguised interest.  And
+King understood.  Enlightenment comes to a man swiftly, when it
+does come, as a rule.
+
+He recalled that Yasmini had not done much to make his first entry
+into Khinjan easy.  On the contrary, she had put him on his mettle
+and had set Rewa Gunga to the task of frightening him and had tested
+him and tried him before tempting him at last.
+
+She must be watching him now, for even the East repeats itself.  She
+had sent Ismail for that purpose.  It might be Ismail's business
+to drive a knife in him at the first opportunity, but he doubted that.
+It was much more likely that, having failed in an attempt to have
+him murdered, she was superstitiously remorseful.  Her course would
+depend on his.  If he failed, she was done with him.  If he succeeded
+in establishing a strong position of his own, she would yield.
+
+All of which did not explain Ismail's whisperings and noddings and
+chin strokings with King's contingent.  But it explained enough
+for King's present purpose, and he wasted no time on riders to
+the problem.  With or without Ismail's aid, with or without his
+enmity, he must control his eighty men and give the slip to the
+mullah, and he went at once about the best way to do both.
+
+"We will go now," he said quietly.  "That sentry in yonder shadow
+has his back turned.  He has over-eaten.  We will rush him and put
+good running between us and the mullah."
+
+Surprised into obedience, and too delighted at the prospect of
+action to wonder why they should obey a hakim so, they slung on
+their bandoliers and made ready.  Ismail brought up King's horse
+and he mounted.  And then at King's word all eighty made a sudden
+swoop on the drowsy sentry and took him unawares.  They tossed him
+over the cliff, too startled to scream an alarm;  and though sentries
+on either hand heard them and shouted, they were gone into outer
+darkness like wind-blown ghosts of dead men before the mullah even
+knew what was happening.
+
+They did not halt until not one of them could run another yard,
+King trusting to his horse to find a footing along the cliff-tops,
+and to the men to find the way.
+
+"Whither?" one whispered to him.
+
+"To Khinjan!" he answered;  and that was enough.  Each whispered
+to the other, and they all became fired with curiosity more potent
+than money bribes.
+
+When he halted at last and dismounted and sat down and the stragglers
+caught up, panting, they held a council of war all together, with
+Ismail sitting at King's back and leaning a chin on his shoulder
+in order to hear better.  Bone pressed on bone, and the place grew
+numb;  King shook him off a dozen times;  but each time Ismail set
+his chin back on the same spot, as a dog will that listens to his
+master.  Yet he insisted he was her man, and not King's.
+
+"Now, ye men of the Hills," said King, "listen to me who am political-
+offender-with-reward-for-capture-offered!"  That was a gem of a title.
+It fired their imaginations.  "I know things that no soldier would
+find out in a thousand years, and I will tell you some of what I know."
+
+Now he had to be careful.  If he were to invent too much they might
+denounce him as a traitor to the "Hills" in general.  If he were
+to tell them too little they would lose interest and might very
+well desert him at the first pinch.  He must feel for the middle
+way and upset no prejudices.
+
+"She has discovered that this mullah Muhammad Anim is no true muslim,
+but an unbelieving dog of a foreigner from Farangistan!  She has
+discovered that he plans to make himself an emperor in these Hills,
+and to sell Hillmen into slavery!"  Might as well serve the mullah
+up hot while about it!  Beyond any doubt not much more than a mile
+away the mullah was getting even by condemning the lot of them to
+death.  "An eye for the risk of an eye!" say the unforgiving Hills.
+
+"If one of us should go back into his camp now he would be tortured.
+Be sure of that."
+
+Breathing deeply in the darkness, they nodded, as if the dark had
+eyes.  Ismail's chin drove a fraction deeper into his shoulder.
+
+"Now ye know--for all men know--that the entrance into Khinjan Caves
+is free to any man who can tell a lie without flinching.  It is
+the way out again that is not free.  How many men do ye know that
+have entered and never returned?"
+
+They all nodded again.  It was common knowledge that Khinjan was
+a very graveyard of the presumptuous.
+
+"She has set a trap for the mullah.  She will let him and all his
+men enter and will never let them out again!"
+
+"How knowest thou?"  This from two men, one on either hand.
+
+"Was I never in Khinjan Caves?" he retorted.  "Whence came I?  I
+am her man, sent to help trap the mullah!  I would have trapped
+all you, but for being weary of these 'Hills' and wishful to go
+back to India and be pardoned!  That is who I am!  That is how I
+know!"
+
+Their breath came and went sibilantly, and the darkness was alive
+with the excitement they thought themselves too warrior-like to utter.
+
+"But what will she do then?" asked somebody.
+
+King searched his memory, and in a moment there came back to him
+a picture of tile hurrying jezailchi he had held up in the Khyber
+Pass, and recollection of the man's words.
+
+"Know ye not," he said, "that long ago she gave leave to all who
+ate the salt to be true to the salt?  She gave the Khyber jezailchis
+leave to fight against her.  Be sure, whatever she does, she will
+stand between no man and his pardon!"
+
+"But will she lead a jihad?  We will not fight against her!"
+
+"Nay," said King, drawing his breath in.  Ismail's chin felt like
+a knife against his collar bone, and Ismail's iron fingers clutched
+his arm.  It was time to give his hostage to dame Fortune.  "She
+will go down into India and use her influence in the matter of
+the pardons!"
+
+"I believe thou art a very great liar indeed!" said the man who
+lacked part of his nose.  "The Pathan went, and he did not come back.
+What proof have we."
+
+"Ye have me!" said King.  "If I show you no proof, how can I escape you?"
+
+They all grunted agreement as to that.  King used his elbow to hit
+Ismail in the ribs.  He did not dare speak to him;  but now was
+the time for Ismail to carry information to her, supposing that
+to be his job.  And after a minute Ismail rolled into a shadow
+and was gone.  King gave him twenty minutes start, letting his
+men rest their legs and exercise their tongues.
+ 
+Now that he was out of the mullah's clutches--and he suspected
+Yasmini would know of it within an hour or two, and before dawn
+in any event--he began to feel like a player in a game of chess
+who foresees his opponent mate in so many moves.
+
+If Yasmini were to let the mullah and his men into the Caves and
+to join forces with him in there, he would at least have time to
+hurry back to India with his eighty men and give warning.  He might
+have time to call up the Khyber jezailchis and blockade the Caves
+before the hive could swarm, and he chuckled to think of the hope
+of that.
+
+On the other hand, if there was to be a battle royal between Yasmini
+and the mullah he would be there to watch it and to comfort India
+with the news.
+
+"Now we will go on again, in order to be close to Khinjan at break
+of day," he said, and they all got up and obeyed him as if his word
+had been law to them for years.  Of all of them he was the only
+man in doubt--he who seemed most confident of all.
+
+They swung along into the darkness under low-hung stars, trailing
+behind King's horse, with only half a dozen of them a hundred yards
+or so ahead as an advance guard, and all of them expecting to see
+Khinjan loom above each next valley, for distances and darkness
+are deceptive in the "Hills," even to trained eyes.  Suddenly the
+advance guard halted, but did not shoot.  And as King caught up
+with them he saw they were talking with some one.
+
+He had to ride up close before be recognized the Orakzai Pathan.
+
+"Salaam!" said the fellow with a grin.  "I bring one hundred
+and eleven!"
+
+As he spoke graveyard shadows rose out of the darkness all around
+and leaned on rifles
+
+"Be ye men all ex-soldiers of the raj?" King asked them.
+
+"Aye!" they growled in chorus.
+
+"What will ye?"
+
+"Pardons!" They all said the word together.
+
+"Who gave you leave to come?" King asked.
+
+"None!  He told us of the pardons and we came!"
+
+"Aye!" said the Orakzai Pathan, drawing King aside.  "But she gave
+me leave to seek them out and tempt them!"
+
+"And what does she intend?" King asked him suddenly.
+
+"She?  Ask Allah, who put the spirit in her!  How should I know?"
+
+"We will march again, my brothers!" King shouted, and they streamed
+along behind him, now with no advance guard, but with the Orakzai
+Pathan striding beside King's horse, with a great hand on the saddle.
+Like the others, he seemed decided in his mind that the hakim ought
+not to be allowed much chance to escape.
+
+Just as the dawn was tinting the surrounding peaks with softest
+rose they topped a ridge, and Khinjan lay below them across the
+mile-wide bone-dry valley.  They all stood and stared at it, leaning
+on their guns.  All the "Men with New Eyes" saw it now for the first
+time, and it held them speechless, for with its patchwork towers
+and high battlements it looked like a very city of the spirits that
+their tales around the fire on winter nights so linger on.
+
+And while they watched, and the Khinjan men were beginning to murmur
+(for they needed no last view of the place to satisfy any longings!)
+none else than Ismail rose from behind a rock and came to King's
+stirrup.  He tugged and King backed his horse until they stood
+together apart.
+
+"She sends this message," said Ismail, showing his teeth in the
+most peculiar grin that surely the Hills ever witnessed.  And then,
+omitting the message, he proceeded first to give some news.  "Many
+of her men who have never been in the army, are none the less true
+to her, and she will not leave them to the mullah's mercy.  They
+will leave the Caves in a little while and will come up here.  They
+are to go down into India and be made prisoners if the sirkar will
+not enlist them.  You are to wait for them here."
+
+"Is that all her message?" King asked him.
+
+"Nay.  That is none of it!  This is her message.  THOU SHALT KNOW
+THIS DAY, THOU ENGLISHMAN, WHETHER OR NOT SHE TRULY LOVED THEE!
+THERE SHALL BE PROOF, SUCH AS EVEN THOU SHALT UNDERSTAND!"'
+
+"What does that mean?"
+
+"Nay, who am I that I should know?"
+
+Ismail slipped away and lost himself among the men, and none of
+them seemed to notice that he had been away and had come again.
+On King's advice a dozen men climbed near-by eminences and began
+to watch for the mullah's coming.  The Khinjan men murmured openly;
+they wanted to be off.
+
+"But no," said King. "Go if ye will, but she has sent word that
+other men are coming.  I wait for them here."
+
+After a great deal of resentful argument they consented to lie
+hidden for an hour or two "but no longer," and King hid his horse
+in a hollow and persuaded three of them to gather grass for him.
+It was a little more than an hour after dawn and the chilled rocks
+were beginning to grow warmer when the head of a procession came
+out of Khinjan Gate and started toward them over the valley.  In
+all more than five hundred men emerged and about a hundred women
+and children, and King's men were kept busy for half an hour
+counting them and quarreling about the exact number.  Some of them
+were burdened heavily, and there was much discussion as to whether
+to loot them or not.  Then:
+
+"Muhammad Anim comes!" shouted a voice from a crag top.
+
+They snuggled into better hiding, and there was no thought now of
+leaving before the mullah should go by.  There began to be wagers
+as to whether her men would be hidden out of sight before the mullah
+could top the rise;  and then, when the last man was safe across
+the valley and up the cliff and in hiding, there was endless argument
+as to how much each had betted and to whom he had lost.  It needed
+an effort to quiet them when the mullah rose into view at last
+above the rise and paused for a minute to stare across at Khinjan
+before leading his four thousand down and onward.  He was silent
+as an image, but his men roared like a river in flood and he made
+no effort to check them.  He was like a man who has made up his
+mind to victory in any event.  He seemed to be speculating three
+or four moves ahead of this one, and to hold this one such a
+foregone conclusion in his mind that it had ceased to interest.
+He was admirable, there was no doubt of that.  In his own way,
+like an old boar sniffing up the wind for trouble, he could command
+a decent man's respect.
+
+He dismounted, for he had to, and tossed his reins to the nearest
+man with the air of an emperor.  And he led the way dawn the
+cliffside without hesitation, striding like a mountaineer.  His
+men followed him noisily, holding hands to make human chains at
+the difficult places and shouting a great deal;  but not quite
+naturally now.  They were too impressed by the seriousness of what
+they undertook, and in their hearts too much afraid.  The noise
+was bravado.
+
+It was a weary long wait, watching from the crevices until the
+last man's back departed down the cliff, and the procession--Pied
+Piper of Hamelin and rats, (but no music!)--wound across the valley.
+At last Khinjan Gate opened and the mullah led in.  The gate did
+not shut after the last man, King noted that.
+
+"Let us go now!" shouted fifty voices, and every man of King's
+party showed himself and stretched.  "Let us go!  Why wait?"
+
+But King would not go.  Nor would he explain why he would not go.
+Nor could he tell himself what held him, gazing at Khinjan, except
+that he thought of Yasmini and ached to know what she was doing.
+
+It was thirty minutes after the last of the mullahs men had vanished
+through the gate, and his own men in dozens and twenties were
+scattered along the cliff-top arguing against delay with growing
+rancor, when a lone horseman galloped out of Khinjan Gate and
+started across the valley.  He rode recklessly.  He was either
+panic-stricken or else bolder than the devil.
+
+In a minute King had recognized the mare, and so had the eyes of
+fifty men around him.  No man with half an eye for a horse could
+have failed to recognize that black mare, having ever seen her once.
+She came like a goat among the rocks, just as she had once dived
+into darkness in the Khyber with King following.  In another two
+minutes King had recognized the Rangar's silken turban.  And now
+there was no need to restrain the men;  they all stood and watched,
+to know what new turn affairs were taking.
+
+Most of them were staring downward at the Rangar's head as he urged
+the mare up the cliff path, when the explanation of Yasmini's message
+came.  It was only King, urged by some intuition, who had his eyes
+fixed on Khinjan.
+
+There came a shock that actually swayed the hill they stood on.
+The mare on the path below missed her footing and fell a dozen feet,
+only to get up again and scramble as if a thousand devils were
+behind her, the Rangar riding her grimly, like a jockey in a race.
+Three more shocks followed.  A great slice of Khinjan suddenly
+caved in with a roar, and smoke and dust burst upward through the
+tumbling crust.
+
+There was a pause after that, as if the waiting elements were
+gathering strength.  For ten minutes they watched and scarcely
+breathed.  Rewa Gunga gained the summit and, dismounting, stood
+by King with the reins over his arm.  The mare was too blown to
+do anything but stand and tremble.  And King was too enthralled
+to do anything but stare.
+
+"That is what a woman can do for a man!" said Rewa Gunga grimly.
+"She set a fuse and exploded all the dynamite.  There were tons
+of it!  The galleries must have fallen in, one on the other!  A
+thousand men digging for a thousand years could never get into
+Khinjan now, and the only way out is down Earth's Drink!  She bade
+me come and bid you good-by, sahib.  I would have stayed in there,
+but she commanded me.  She said, 'Tell King sahib my love was true.
+Tell him I give him India and all Asia that were at my mercy!' "
+
+While the Rangar spoke there came three more earth tremors in
+swift succession, and a thunder out of Khinjan as if the very "Hills"
+were coming to an end.  The mare grew frantic and the Rangar summoned
+six men to hold her.
+
+Suddenly, right over the top of Khinjan's upper rim, where only
+the eagles ever perched, there burst a column of water, immeasurable,
+huge, that for a moment blotted out the sun.  It rose sheer upward,
+curved on itself, and fell in a million-ton deluge on to Khinjan
+and into Khinjan valley, hissing and roaring and thundering.
+
+Earth's Drink had been blocked by the explosion and had found a
+new way over the barrier before plunging down again into the bowels
+of the world.  The one sky-flung leap it made as its weight burst
+down a mountain wall was enough to blot out Khinjan forever, and
+what had been a dry mile-wide moat was a shallow lake with death's
+rack and rubbish floating on the surface.
+
+The earth rocked.  The Hillmen prayed, and King stared, trying to
+memorize all that had been.  Suddenly it flashed across his mind
+that the Rangar who had striven like a fiend to stab him only a
+matter of hours ago was now standing behind him, within a yard.
+
+He was up on his feet in a second and faced about.  The Rangar laughed.
+
+"So ends the 'Heart of the Hills!' " he said.  "Think kindly of her,
+sahib.  She thought well enough of you!"
+
+He laughed again and sprang on the black mare, and before King
+could speak or raise a hand to stop him be was off, hell-bent-for-
+leather along the precipice in the direction of the Khyber Pass
+and India.  Two of the men who had come out of Khinjan mounted and
+spurred after him.
+
+King collected his men and the women and children.  It was easy,
+for they were numb from what they had witnessed and dazed by fear.
+In half an hour he had them mustered and marching.
+
+"Let us go back and loot the mullah's camp and take the women!"
+urged a dozen men at least.
+
+"Go then!" said King.  "Go back!  But I go on!"
+
+"He is afraid!  The hakim is afraid of what he saw!"
+
+King let them think so.  He let them think anything they chose,
+knowing well that what had unnerved him had at least rendered them
+amenable to leading.  They would have no more dared go back without
+him, and without at least a hundred others, than they would have
+dared go and hunt in the ruins of Khinjan.
+
+Even Ismail clang to his stirrup and would not leave him, looking
+like a fledgling with his beard all new-sprouted on his jaw, and
+eyes wider than any bird's.
+
+"Why art thou here?" King asked him.  "Had she no true men who
+would die with her?"
+
+The Afridi scowled, but choked the answer back.
+ 
+"Art thou my man now?" King asked him.  But he shook his head.
+
+So they marched without talking over the hideous boulder-strewn
+range that separates Khinjan from the Khyber, sleeping fitfully
+whenever King called a halt, and eating almost nothing at all, for
+only a few of them had thought of bringing food.
+
+They reached the Khyber famished and were fed at Ali Masjid Fort,
+after King had given a certain password and had whispered to the
+officer commanding.  But he did not change into European clothes yet,
+and none of his following suspected him of being an Englishman.
+
+"A Rangar on a black mare has gone down the pass ahead of you in
+a hurry," they told him at Ali Masjid.  "He had two men with him and
+food enough.  Only stopped long enough to make his business known."
+
+"What did he say his business is?" asked King.
+
+"He gave a sign and said a word that satisfied us--on that point!"
+
+"Oh!" said King.  "Can you signal down the Pass?"
+
+"Surely."
+
+"Courtenay still at Jamrud?"
+
+"Yes.  In charge there and growing tired of doing nothing."
+
+"Signal down and ask him to have that bath ready for me that I
+spoke about.  Good-by."
+
+So he left Ali Masjid at the head of a motley procession that grew
+noisier and more confident every hour.  Ismail still clung to his
+stirrup, but began to grow more lively and to have a good many
+orders to fling to the rest.
+
+"You mourn like a dog," King told him.  "Three howls and a whine
+and a little sulking--and then forgetfulness!"
+
+Ismail looked nasty at that but did not answer, although he seemed
+to have a hot word ready.  And thenceforward he hung his head more,
+and at least tried to seem bereaved.  But his manner was unconvincing
+none the less, and King found it food for thought.
+
+The ex-soldiers and would-be soldiers marched in fours behind him,
+growing hourly more like drilled men, and talking, with each stride
+that brought them nearer India, more as men do who have an interest
+in law and order.  Behind them tramped the women from Khinjan,
+carrying their babies and their husbands loads;  and behind them
+again were the other women, who had been told they would be overtaken
+in the Khyber, but who had actually had to run themselves raw-footed
+in order to catch up.
+
+Down the Khyber have come conquerors, a dozen conquering kings,
+and as many beaten armies;  but surely no stranger host than this
+ever trudged between the echoing walls.  The very eagles screamed
+at them.
+
+And as they neared Jamrud Fort the men who sought pardons began
+to grow sheepish.  They began to remember that the hakim might
+after all be a trickster, and to realize how much too friendly--
+how almost intimate he had been with the sahibs at Ali Masjid.
+They began to cluster round him instead of letting him lead, and
+by the time they met the farthest outposts up the Khyber they were
+as nervous as raw recruits and ready to turn and bolt at a word--
+for no one can be more timid than your Hillman when he is not sure
+of himself, just as no one can be braver when he knows his ground.
+
+Signals preceded them, and Courtenay himself rode up the Pass to
+greet them.  But of course he was not very cordial to King,
+considering his disguise;  and he chose to keep the Hillmen in
+doubt yet as to their eventual reception.  But one of them, the
+Orakzai Pathan (for nothing could completely unman him), shouted
+to know whether it was true that pardons had been offered for
+deserters, and Courtenay nodded.  They were less timid after that.
+Some of them pulled medals out and pinned them outside their shirts.
+
+At Jamrud they were given food and their rifles were taken away
+from them and a guard was set to watch them.  But the guard only
+consisted of two men, both of whom were Pathans, and they assured
+them that, ridiculous though it sounded, the British were actually
+willing to forgive their enemies and to pardon all deserters who
+applied for pardon on condition of good faith in the future.
+
+That night they prayed to Allah like little children lost and found.
+The women crooned love-songs to their babies over the clear fires
+and the men talked--and talked--and talked until the stars grew
+big as moons to weary eyes and they slept at last, to dream of
+khaki uniforms and karnel sahibs who knew neither fear nor favor
+and who said things that were so.  It is a mad world to the Himalayan
+Hillman where men in authority tell truth unadorned without shame
+and without consideration--a mad, mad world, and perhaps too exotic
+to be wholesome, but pleasant while the dream lasts.
+
+Over in the fort Courtenay placed a bath at King's disposal and
+lent him clean clothes and a razor.  But he was not very cordial.
+
+"Tell me all the war news!" said King, splashing in the tub.  And
+Courtenay told him, passing him another cake of soap when the first
+was finished.  After all there was not much to tell--butchery in
+Belgium--Huns and guns--and the everlastingly glorious stand that
+saved Paris and France and Europe.
+
+"According to the cables our men are going the records one better.
+I think that's all," said Courtenay.
+
+"Then why the stuffiness?" asked King.  "Why am I talked to at the
+end of a tube, so to speak?"
+
+"You're under arrest!" said Courtenay.
+
+"The deuce I am!"
+
+"I'm taking care of you myself to obviate the necessity of putting
+a sentry on guard over you."
+
+"Good of you, I'm sure.  What's it all about?"
+
+"I don't mind telling you, but I'd rather you'd wait.  The minute
+you were sighted word was wired down to headquarters, and the
+general himself will be up here by train any minute."
+
+"Very well," said King. "Got a cigar?  Got a black one?  Blacker
+the better!"
+
+He was out of his bath and remembered that minute that he had not
+smoked a cigar since leaving India.  Naked, shaved, with some of
+the stain removed, he did not look like a man in trouble as he filled
+his lungs with the saltpeterish smoke of a fat Trichinopoli.
+
+And then the general came and did not wait for King to get dressed
+but burst into the bathroom and shook hands with him while he was
+still naked and asked ten questions (like a gatling gun) while King
+was getting on his trousers, divining each answer after the third
+word and waving the rest aside.
+
+"And why am I arrested, sir?" asked King the moment he could slip
+the question in edgewise.
+
+"Oh, yes, of course.  Try the case here as well as anywhere.  What
+does this mean?"
+
+Out of his pocket the general produced a letter that smelt strongly
+of a scent King recognized.  He spread it out on a table, and
+King read.  It was Yasmini's letter that she had sent down the
+Khyber to make India too hot to hold him.
+
+        "Your Captain King has been too much trouble.  He has
+        taken money from the Germans.  He adopted native dress.
+        He called himself Kurram Khan.  He slew his own brother
+        at night in the Khyber Pass.  These men will say that
+        he carried the head to Khinjan, and their word is true.
+        I, Yasmini, saw.  He used the head for a passport to
+        obtain admittance.  He proclaims a jihad!  He urges
+        invasion of India!  He held up his brother's head before
+        five thousand men and boasted of the murder.  The next
+        you shall hear of your Captain King of the Khyber Rifles
+        he will be leading a jihad into India.  You would have
+        better trusted me.  Yasmini."
+
+"Too bad about your brother," said the general.
+
+"The body is buried.  How much is true about the head?"
+
+King told him.
+
+"Where's she?" asked the general.
+
+King did not answer.  The general waited.
+
+"I don't know, sir."
+
+"Ask the Rangar," Courtenay suggested.
+
+"Where is he?" asked King.
+
+"Caught him coming down the Khyber on his black mare and arrested him.
+He's in the next room!  I hope he's to be hanged.  So that I can
+buy the mare," he added cheerfully.
+
+King whistled softly to himself, and the general looked at him
+through half-closed eyes.
+
+"Go in and talk to him, King.  Let me know the result."
+
+He had picked King to go up the Khyber on that errand not for nothing.
+He knew King and he knew the symptoms.  Without answering him King
+obeyed.  He went out of the room into a dark corridor and rapped
+on the door of the next room to the right.  There was a muffled
+answer from within.  Courtenay shouted something to the sentry
+outside the door and he called another man who fitted a key in
+the lock.  King walked into a room in which one lamp was burning
+and the door slammed shut behind him.
+
+He was in there an hour, and it never did transpire just what passed,
+for he can hold his tongue on any subject like a clam, and the general,
+if anything, can go him one better.  Courtenay was placed under
+orders not to talk, so those who say they know exactly what happened
+in the room between the time when the door was shut on King and
+the time when he knocked to have it opened and called for the general,
+are not telling the truth.
+
+What is known is that finally the general hurried through the door
+and ejaculated, "Well, I'm damned!" before it could close again.
+The sentry (Punjabi Mussulman) has sworn to that over a dozen
+camp-fires since the day.
+
+And it is known, too, for the sentry has taken oath on it and has
+told the story so many times without much variation that no one
+who knows the man's record doubts any longer--it is known that
+when the door opened again King and the general walked out, with
+the Rangar between them.  And the Rangar had no turban on, but
+carried it unwound in his hand.  And his golden hair fell nearly
+to his knees and changed his whole appearance.  And he was weeping.
+And he was not a Rangar at all, but she, and how anybody can ever
+have mistaken her for a man, even in man's clothes and with her
+skin darkened, was beyond the sentry's power to guess.  He for
+one, etc. . . .  But nobody believed that part of his tale.
+
+As Yussuf bin Ali said over the camp-fire up the Khyber later on,
+"When she sets out to disguise herself, she is what she will be,
+and he who says he thinks otherwise has two tongues and no conscience!"
+
+What is surely true is that the four of them--Yasmini, the general,
+Courtenay and King sat up all night in a room in the fort, talking
+together, while a succession of sentries overstrained their ears
+endeavoring to hear through keyholes.  And the sentries heard
+nothing and invented very much.
+
+But Partan Singh, the Sikh, who carried in bread and cocoa to them
+at about five the next morning and found them still talking, heard
+King say, "So, in my opinion, sir, there'll be no jihad in these
+parts.  There'll be sporadic raids, of course, but nothing a brigade
+can't deal with.  The heart of the holy war's torn out and thrown away."
+
+"Very well," said the general.  "You can get up the Khyber again
+and join your regiment."'
+
+But by that time the Rangar's turban was on again and the tears
+were dry, and it was Partan Singh who threw most doubt on the sentry's
+tale about the golden hair.  But, as the sentry said, no doubt
+Partan Singh was jealous.
+
+There is no doubt whatever that the general went back to Peshawur
+in the train at eight o'clock and that the Rangar went with him
+in a separate compartment with about a dozen Hillmen chosen from
+among those who had come down with King.
+
+And it is certain that before they went King had a talk with the
+Rangar in a room alone, of which conversation, however, the sentry
+reported afterward that he did not overhear one word;  and he had
+to go to the doctor with a cold in his ear at that.  He said he
+was nearly sure be heard weeping.  But on the other hand, those
+who saw both of them come out were certain that both were smiling.
+
+It is quite certain that Athelstan King went up the Khyber again,
+for the official records say so, and they never lie, especially
+in time of war.  He rode a coal-black mare, and Courtenay called
+him "Chikki"--a "lifter."
+
+Some say the Rangar went to Delhi.  Some say Yasmini is in Delhi.
+Some say no.  But it is quite certain that before he started up
+the Khyber King showed Courtenay a great gold bracelet that he had
+under his sleeve.  Five men saw him do it.
+
+And if that was really Rewa Gunga in the general's train, why was
+the general so painfully polite to him?  And why did Ismail insist
+on riding in the train, instead of accepting King's offer to go
+up the Khyber with him?
+
+One thing is very certain.  King was right about the jihad.  There has
+been none in spite of all Turkey's and Germany's efforts.  There have
+been sporadic raids, much as usual, but nothing one brigade could not
+easily deal with, the paid press to the contrary notwithstanding.
+
+King of the Khyber Rifles is now a major, for you can see that by
+turning up the army list.
+
+But if you wish to know just what transpired in the room in Jamrud
+Fort while the general and Courtenay waited, you must ask King--if
+you dare;  for only he knows, and one other.  It is not likely you
+can find the other.
+
+But it is likely that you may hear from both of them again, for "A
+woman and intrigue are one!" as India says.  The war seems long,
+and the world is large, and the chances for intrigue are almost
+infinite, given such combination as King and Yasmini and a love affair.
+
+And as King says on occasion:  "Kuch dar nahin hai!  There is no
+such thing as fear!"  Another one might say, "The roof's the limit!"
+
+And bear in mind, for this is important:  King wrote to Yasmini a
+letter, in Urdu from the mullah's cave, in which he as good as gave
+her his word of honor to be her "loyal servant" should she choose
+to return to her allegiance.  He is no splitter of hairs, no quibbler.
+His word is good on the darkest night or wherever he casts a shadow
+in the sun.
+
+"A man and his promise--a woman and intrigue--are one!"
+
+
+The End
+
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of King--of the Khyber Rifles, by Talbot Mundy
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: King--of the Khyber Rifles
+       A Romance of Adventure
+
+Author: Talbot Mundy
+
+Release Date: July, 2004  [EBook #6066]
+Last Updated: March 16, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KING--OF THE KHYBER RIFLES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by M.R.J.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+KING--OF THE KHYBER RIFLES
+
+A Romance of Adventure
+
+
+By Talbot Mundy
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+
+     Suckled were we in a school unkind
+     On suddenly snatched deduction
+     And ever ahead of you (never behind!)
+     Over the border our tracks you'll find,
+     Wherever some idiot feels inclined
+     To scatter the seeds of ruction.
+
+     For eyes we be, of Empire, we!
+     Skinned and Puckered and quick to see
+     And nobody guesses how wise we be.
+     Unwilling to advertise we be.
+     But, hot on the trail of ties, we be
+     The pullers of roots of ruction!
+
+     --Son of the Indian Secret Service
+
+
+The men who govern India--more power to them and her!--are few. Those
+who stand in their way and pretend to help them with a flood of words
+are a host. And from the host goes up an endless cry that India is the
+home of thugs, and of three hundred million hungry ones.
+
+The men who know--and Athelstan King might claim to know a
+little--answer that she is the original home of chivalry and the modern
+mistress of as many decent, gallant, native gentlemen as ever graced a
+page of history.
+
+The charge has seen the light in print that India--well-spring of
+plague and sudden death and money-lenders--has sold her soul to twenty
+succeeding conquerors in turn.
+
+Athelstan King and a hundred like him whom India has picked from British
+stock and taught, can answer truly that she has won it back again from
+each by very purity of purpose.
+
+So when the world war broke the world was destined to be surprised on
+India's account. The Red Sea, full of racing transports crowded with
+dark-skinned gentlemen, whose one prayer was that the war might not be
+over before they should have struck a blow for Britain, was the Indian
+army's answer to the press.
+
+The rest of India paid its taxes and contributed and muzzled itself and
+set to work to make supplies. For they understand in India, almost as
+nowhere else, the meaning of such old-fashioned words as gratitude and
+honor; and of such platitudes as, “Give and it shall be given unto you.”
+
+More than one nation was deeply shocked by India's answer to “practises”
+ that had extended over years. But there were men in India who learned to
+love India long ago with that love that casts out fear, who knew exactly
+what was going to happen and could therefore afford to wait for orders
+instead of running round in rings.
+
+Athelstan King, for instance, nothing yet but a captain unattached, sat
+in meagerly furnished quarters with his heels on a table. He is not a
+doctor, yet he read a book on surgery, and when he went over to the club
+he carried the book under his arm and continued to read it there. He is
+considered a rotten conversationalist, and he did nothing at the club to
+improve his reputation.
+
+“Man alive--get a move on!” gasped a wondering senior, accepting a
+cigar. Nobody knows where he gets those long, strong, black cheroots,
+and nobody ever refuses one.
+
+“Thanks--got a book to read,” said King.
+
+“You ass! Wake up and grab the best thing in sight, as a stepping stone
+to something better! Wake up and worry!”
+
+King grinned. You have to when you don't agree with a senior officer,
+for the army is like a school in many more ways than one.
+
+“Help yourself, sir! I'll take the job that's left when the scramble's
+over. Something good's sure to be overlooked.”
+
+“White feather? Laziness? Dark Horse?” the major wondered. Then he
+hurried away to write telegrams, because a belief thrives in the early
+days of any war that influence can make or break a man's chances. In
+the other room where the telegraph blanks were littered in confusion
+all about the floor, he ran into a crony whose chief sore point was
+Athelstan King, loathing him as some men loathe pickles or sardines, for
+no real reason whatever, except that they are what they are.
+
+“Saw you talking to King,” he said.
+
+“Yes. Can't make him out. Rum fellow!”
+
+“Rum? Huh! Trouble is he's seventh of his family in succession to serve
+in India. She has seeped into him and pickled his heritage. He's a
+believer in Kismet crossed on to Opportunity. Not sure he doesn't pray
+to Allah on the sly! Hopeless case.”
+
+“Are you sure?”
+
+“Quite!”
+
+So they all sent telegrams and forgot King who sat and smoked and read
+about surgery; and before he had nearly finished one box of cheroots
+a general at Peshawur wiped a bald red skull and sent him an urgent
+telegram.
+
+“Come at once!” it said simply.
+
+King was at Lahore, but miles don't matter when the dogs of war are
+loosed. The right man goes to the right place at the exact right time
+then, and the fool goes to the wall. In that one respect war is better
+than some kinds of peace.
+
+In the train on the way to Peshawur he did not talk any more volubly,
+and a fellow traveler, studying him from the opposite corner of the
+stifling compartment, catalogued him as “quite an ordinary man.” But he
+was of the Public Works Department, which is sorrowfully underpaid and
+wears emotions on its sleeve for policy's sake, believing of course that
+all the rest of the world should do the same.
+
+“Don't you think we're bound in honor to go to Belgium's aid?” he asked.
+“Can you see any way out of it?”
+
+“Haven't looked for one,” said King.
+
+“But don't you think--”
+
+“No,” said King. “I hardly ever think. I'm in the army, don't you know,
+and don't have to. What's the use of doing somebody else's work?”
+
+“Rotter!” thought the P.W.D. man, almost aloud; but King was not
+troubled by any further forced conversation. Consequently he reached
+Peshawur comfortable, in spite of the heat. And his genial manner
+of saluting the full-general who met him with a dog-cart at Peshawur
+station was something scandalous.
+
+“Is he a lunatic or a relative of royalty?” the P.W.D. man wondered.
+
+Full-generals, particularly in the early days of war, do not drive
+to the station to meet captains very often; yet King climbed into the
+dog-cart unexcitedly, after keeping the general waiting while he checked
+a trunk!
+
+The general cracked his whip without any other comment than a smile.
+A blood mare tore sparks out of the macadam, and a dusty military road
+began to ribbon out between the wheels. Sentries in unexpected places
+announced themselves with a ring of shaken steel as their rifles came to
+the “present,” which courtesies the general noticed with a raised whip.
+Then a fox-terrier resumed his chase of squirrels between the planted
+shade-trees, and Peshawur became normal, shimmering in light and heat
+reflected from the “Hills.”
+
+(The P.W.D. man, who would have giggled if a general mentioned him by
+name, walked because no conveyance could be hired. Judgment was in the
+wind.)
+
+On the dog-cart's high front seat, staring straight ahead of him between
+the horse's ears, King listened. The general did nearly all the talking.
+
+“The North's the danger.”
+
+King grunted with the lids half-lowered over full dark eyes. He did not
+look especially handsome in that attitude. Some men swear he looks like
+a Roman, and others liken him to a gargoyle, all of them choosing to
+ignore the smile that can transform his whole face instantly.
+
+“We're denuding India of troops--not keeping back more than a mere
+handful to hold the tribes in check.”
+
+King nodded. There has never been peace along the northwest border. It
+did not need vision to foresee trouble from that quarter. In fact it
+must have been partly on the strength of some of King's reports that the
+general was planning now.
+
+“That was a very small handful of Sikhs you named as likely to give
+trouble. Did you do that job thoroughly?”
+
+King grunted.
+
+“Well--Delhi's chock-full of spies, all listening to stories made in
+Germany for them to take back to the 'Hills' with 'em. The tribes'll
+know presently how many men we're sending oversea. There've been rumors
+about Khinjan by the hundred lately. They're cooking something. Can you
+imagine 'em keeping quiet now?”
+
+“That depends, sir. Yes, I can imagine it.”
+
+The general laughed. “That's why I sent for you. I need a man with
+imagination! There's a woman you've got to work with on this occasion
+who can imagine a shade or two too much. What's worse, she's ambitious.
+So I chose you to work with her.”
+
+King's lips stiffened under his mustache, and the corners of his eyes
+wrinkled into crow's-feet to correspond. Eyes are never coal-black, of
+course, but his looked it at that minute.
+
+“You know we've sent men to Khinjan who are said to have entered the
+Caves. Not one of 'em has ever returned.”
+
+King frowned.
+
+“She claims she can enter the Caves and come out again at pleasure. She
+has offered to do it, and I have accepted.”
+
+It would not have been polite to look incredulous, so King's expression
+changed to one of intense interest a little overdone, as the general did
+not fail to notice.
+
+“If she hadn't given proof of devotion and ability, I'd have turned
+her down. But she has. Only the other day she uncovered a plot in
+Delhi--about a million dynamite bombs in a ruined temple in charge of a
+German agent for use by mutineers supposed to be ready to rise against
+us. Fact! Can you guess who she is?”
+
+“Not Yasmini?” King hazarded, and the general nodded and flicked his
+whip. The horse mistook it for a signal, and it was two minutes before
+the speed was reduced to mere recklessness.
+
+The helmet-strap mark, printed indelibly on King's jaw and cheek by the
+Indian sun, tightened and grew whiter--as the general noted out of the
+corner of his eye.
+
+“Know her?”
+
+“Know of her, of course, sir. Everybody does. Never met her to my
+knowledge.”
+
+“Um-m-m! Whose fault was that? Somebody ought to have seen to that. Go
+to Delhi now and meet her. I'll send her a wire to say you're coming.
+She knows I've chosen you. She tried to insist on full discretion, but
+I overruled her. Between us two, she'll have discretion once she gets
+beyond Jamrud. The 'Hills' are full of our spies, of course, but none
+of 'em dare try Khinjan Caves any more and you'll be the only check we
+shall have on her.”
+
+King's tongue licked his lips, and his eyes wrinkled. The general's
+voice became the least shade more authoritative.
+
+“When you see her, get a pass from her that'll take you into Khinjan
+Caves! Ask her for it! For the sake of appearances I'll gazette you
+Seconded to the Khyber Rifles. For the sake of success, get a pass from
+her!”
+
+“Very well, sir.”
+
+“You've a brother in the Khyber Rifles, haven't you? Was it you or your
+brother who visited Khinjan once and sent in a report?”
+
+“I did, sir.”
+
+He spoke without pride. Even the brigade of British-Indian cavalry that
+went to Khinjan on the strength of his report and leveled its defenses
+with the ground, had not been able to find the famous Caves. Yet the
+Caves themselves are a by-word.
+
+“There's talk of a jihad (holy war). There's worse than that! When you
+went to Khinjan, what was your chief object?”
+
+“To find the source of the everlasting rumors about the so-called 'Heart
+of the Hills,' sir.”
+
+“Yes, yes. I remember. I read your report. You didn't find anything, did
+you? Well. The story is now that the 'Heart of the Hills' has come to
+life. So the spies say.”
+
+King whistled softly.
+
+“There's no guessing what it means,” said the general. “Go and find
+out. Go and work with Yasmini. I shall have enough men here to attack
+instantly and smash any small force as soon as it begins to gather
+anywhere near the border. But Khinjan is another story. We can't prove
+anything, but the spies keep bringing in rumors of ten thousand men in
+Khinjan Caves, and of another large lashkar not far away from Khinjan.
+There must be no jihad, King! India is all but defenseless! We can
+tackle sporadic raids. We can even handle an ordinary raid in force. But
+this story about a 'Heart of the Hills' coming to life may presage unity
+of action and a holy war such as the world has not seen. Go up there and
+stop it if you can. At least, let me know the facts.”
+
+King grunted. To stop a holy war single-handed would be rather like
+stopping the wind--possibly easy enough, if one knew the way. Yet
+he knew no general would throw away a man like himself on a useless
+venture. He began to look happy.
+
+The general clucked to the mare and the big beast sank an inch between
+the shafts. The sais behind set his feet against the drop-board and
+clung with both hands to the seat. One wheel ceased to touch the gravel
+as they whirled along a semicircular drive. Suddenly the mare drew up
+on her haunches, under the porch of a pretentious residence. Sentries
+saluted. The sais swung down. In less than sixty seconds King was
+following the general through a wide entrance into a crowded hall. The
+instant the general's fat figure darkened the doorway twenty men of
+higher rank than King, native and English, rose from lined-up chairs and
+pressed forward.
+
+“Sorry--have to keep you all waiting--busy!” He waved them aside with a
+little apologetic gesture. “Come in here, King.”
+
+King followed him through a door that slammed tight behind them on
+rubber jambs.
+
+“Sit down!”
+
+The general unlocked a steel drawer and began to rummage among the
+papers in it. In a minute he produced a package, bound in rubber bands,
+with a faded photograph face-upward on the top.
+
+“That's the woman! How d'you like the look of her?”
+
+King took the package and for a minute stared hard at the likeness of a
+woman whose fame has traveled up and down India, until her witchery
+has become a proverb. She was dressed as a dancing woman, yet very few
+dancing women could afford to be dressed as she was.
+
+King's service uses whom it may, and he had met and talked with many
+dancing women in the course of duty; but as he stared at Yasmini's
+likeness he did not think he had ever met one who so measured up to
+rumor. The nautch he knew for a delusion. Yet--!
+
+The general watched his face with eyes that missed nothing.
+
+“Remember--I said work with her!”
+
+King looked up and nodded.
+
+“They say she's three parts Russian,” said the general. “To my own
+knowledge she speaks Russian like a native, and about twenty other
+tongues as well, including English. She speaks English as well as you or
+I. She was the girl-widow of a rascally Hill-rajah. There's a story I've
+heard, to the effect that Russia arranged her marriage in the day when
+India was Russia's objective--and that's how long ago?--seems like
+weeks, not years! I've heard she loved her rajah. And I've heard she
+didn't! There's another story that she poisoned him. I know she got
+away with his money--and that's proof enough of brains! Some say she's
+a she-devil. I think that's an exaggeration, but bear in mind she's
+dangerous!”
+
+King grinned. A man who trusts Eastern women over readily does not rise
+far in the Secret Service.
+
+“If you've got nous enough to keep on her soft side and use her--not let
+her use you--you can keep the 'Hills' quiet and the Khyber safe! If
+you can contrive that--now--in this pinch--there's no limit for you!
+Commander-in-chief shall be your job before you're sixty!”
+
+King pocketed the photograph and papers. “I'm well enough content, sir,
+as things are,” he said quietly.
+
+“Well, remember she's ambitious, even if you're not! I'm not preaching
+ambition, mind--I'm warning you! Ambition's bad! Study those papers on
+your way down to Delhi and see that I get them back.”
+
+The general paced once across the room and once back again, with hands
+behind him. Then he stopped in front of King.
+
+“No man in India has a stiffer task than you have now! It may encourage
+you to know that I realize that! She's the key to the puzzle, and she
+happens to be in Delhi. Go to Delhi, then. A jihad launched from the
+'Hills' would mean anarchy in the plains. That would entail sending
+back from France an army that can't be spared. There must be no jihad,
+King!--There must--not--be--one! Keep that in your head!”
+
+“What arrangements have been made with her, sir?”
+
+“Practically none! She's watching the spies in Delhi, but they're likely
+to break for the 'Hills' any minute. Then they'll be arrested. When that
+happens the fate of India may be in your hands and hers! Get out of my
+way now, until tiffin-time!”
+
+In a way that some men never learn, King proceeded to efface himself
+entirely among the crowd in the hall, contriving to say nothing of any
+account to anybody until the great gong boomed and the general led
+them all in to his long dining table. Yet he did not look furtive
+or secretive. Nobody noticed him, and he noticed everybody. There is
+nothing whatever secretive about that.
+
+The fare was plain, and the meal a perfunctory affair. The general and
+his guests were there for other reason than to eat food, and only the
+man who happened to seat himself next to King--a major by the name of
+Hyde--spoke to him at all.
+
+“Why aren't you with your regiment?” he asked.
+
+“Because the general asked me to lunch, sir!”
+
+“I suppose you've been pestering him for an appointment!”
+
+King, with his mouth full of curry did not answer, but his eyes smiled.
+
+“It's astonishing to me,” said the major, “that a captain should leave
+his company when war has begun! When I was captain I'd have been driven
+out of the service if I'd asked for leave of absence at such a time!”
+
+King made no comment, but his expression denoted belief.
+
+“Are you bound for the front, sir?” he asked presently. But Hyde did not
+answer. They finished the meal in silence.
+
+After lunch he was closeted with the general again for twenty minutes.
+Then one of the general's carriages took him to the station; and it did
+not appear to trouble him at all that the other occupant of the carriage
+was the self-same Major Hyde who had sat next him at lunch. In fact, he
+smiled so pleasantly that Hyde grew exasperated. Neither of them spoke.
+At the station Hyde lost his temper openly, and King left him abusing an
+unhappy native servant.
+
+The station was crammed to suffocation by a crowd that roared and
+writhed and smelt to high heaven. At one end of the platform, in the
+midst of a human eddy, a frenzied horse resisted with his teeth and all
+four feet at once the efforts of six natives and a British sergeant to
+force him into a loose-box. At the back of the same platform the little
+dark-brown mules of a mountain battery twitched their flanks in line,
+jingling chains and stamping when the flies bit home.
+
+Flies buzzed everywhere. Fat native merchants vied with lean and timid
+ones in noisy effort to secure accommodation on a train already crowded
+to the limit. Twenty British officers hunted up and down for the places
+supposed to have been reserved for them, and sweating servants hurried
+after them with arms full of heterogeneous baggage, swearing at
+the crowd that swore back ungrudgingly. But the general himself had
+telephoned for King's reservation, so he took his time.
+
+There were din and stink and dust beneath a savage sun, shaken into
+reverberations by the scream of an engine's safety valve. It was India
+in essence and awake!--India arising out of lethargy!--India as she is
+more often nowadays--and it made King, for the time being of the Khyber
+Rifles, happier than some other men can be in ballrooms.
+
+Any one who watched him--and there was at least one man who did--must
+have noticed his strange ability, almost like that of water, to reach
+the point he aimed for, through, and not around, the crowd.
+
+He neither shoved nor argued. Orders and blows would have been equally
+useless, for had it tried the crowd could not have obeyed, and it was in
+no mind to try. Without the least apparent effort he arrived--and
+there is no other word that quite describes it--he arrived, through
+the densest part of the sweating throng of humans, at the door of the
+luggage office.
+
+There, though a bunnia's sharp elbow nagged his ribs, and the bunnia's
+servant dropped a heavy package on his foot, he smiled so genially that
+he melted the wrath of the frantic luggage clerk. But not at once. Even
+the sun needs seconds to melt ice.
+
+“Am I God?” the babu wailed. “Can I do all the-e things in all the-e
+world at once if not sooner?”
+
+King's smile began to get its work in. The man ceased gesticulating to
+wipe sweat from his stubbly jowl with the end of a Punjabi headdress. He
+actually smiled back. Who was he, that he should suspect new outrage or
+guess he was about to be used in a game he did not understand? He would
+have stopped all work to beg for extra pay at the merest suggestion of
+such a thing; but as it was he raised both fists and lapsed into his own
+tongue to apostrophize the ruffian who dared jostle King. A Northerner
+who did not seem to understand Punjabi almost cost King his balance as
+he thrust broad shoulders between him and the bunnia.
+
+The bunnia chattered like an outraged ape; but King, the person most
+entitled to be angry, actually apologized! That being a miracle, the
+babu forthwith wrought another one, and within a minute King's one trunk
+was checked through to Delhi.
+
+“Delhi is right, sahib?” he asked, to make doubly sure; for in India
+where the milk of human kindness is not hawked in the market-place, men
+will pay over-measure for a smile.
+
+“Yes. Delhi is right. Thank you, babuji.”
+
+He made more room for the Hillman, beaming amusement at the man's
+impatience; but the Hillman had no luggage and turned away, making an
+unexpected effort to hide his face with a turban end. He who had forced
+his way to the front with so much violence and haste now burst back
+again toward the train like a football forward tearing through the thick
+of his opponents. He scattered a swath a yard wide, for he had shoulders
+like a bull. King saw him leap into third-class carriage. He saw, too,
+that he was not wanted in the carriage. There was a storm of protest
+from tight-packed native passengers, but the fellow had his way.
+
+The swath through the crowd closed up like water in a ship's wake, but
+it opened again for King. He smiled so humorously that the angry jostled
+ones smiled too and were appeased, forgetting haste and bruises and
+indignity merely because understanding looked at them through merry
+eyes. All crowds are that way, but an Indian crowd more so than all.
+
+Taking his time, and falling foul of nobody, King marked down a native
+constable--hot and unhappy, leaning with his back against the train. He
+touched him on the shoulder and the fellow jumped.
+
+“Nay, sahib! I am only constabeel--I know nothing--I can do nothing! The
+teerain goes when it goes, and then perhaps we will beat these people
+from the platform and make room again! But there is no authority--no law
+any more--they are all gone mad!”
+
+King wrote on a pad, tore off a sheet, folded it and gave it to him.
+
+“That is for the Superintendent of Police at the office. Carriage number
+1181, eleven doors from here--the one with the shut door and a big
+Hillman inside sitting three places from the door facing the engine.
+Get the Hillman! No, there is only one Hillman in the carriage. No, the
+others are not his friends; they will not help him. He will fight, but
+he has no friends in that carriage.”
+
+The “constabeel” obeyed, not very cheerfully. King stood to watch him
+with a foot on the step of a first-class coach. Another constable passed
+him, elbowing a snail's progress between the train and the crowd. He
+seized the man's arm.
+
+“Go and help that man!” he ordered. “Hurry!”
+
+Then he climbed into the carriage and leaned from the window. He grinned
+as he saw both constables pounce on a third-class carriage door and,
+with the yell of good huntsmen who have viewed, seize the protesting
+Northerner by the leg and begin to drag him forth. There was a fight,
+that lasted three minutes, in the course of which a long knife flashed.
+But there were plenty to help take the knife away, and the Hillman stood
+handcuffed and sullen at last, while one of his captors bound a cut
+forearm. Then they dragged him away; but not before he had seen King at
+the window, and had lipped a silent threat.
+
+“I believe you, my son!” King chuckled, half aloud. “I surely believe
+you! I'll watch! Ham dekta hai!”
+
+“Why was that man arrested?” asked an acid voice behind him; and without
+troubling to turn his head, he knew that Major Hyde was to be
+his carriage mate again. To be vindictive, on duty or off it, is
+foolishness; but to let opportunity slip by one is a crime. He looked
+glad, not sorry, as he faced about--pleased, not disappointed--like a
+man on a desert island who has found a tool.
+
+“Why was that man arrested?” the major asked again.
+
+“I ordered it,” said King.
+
+“So I imagined. I asked you why.”
+
+King stared at him and then turned to watch the prisoner being dragged
+away; he was fighting again, striking at his captors' heads with
+handcuffed wrists.
+
+“Does he look innocent?” asked King.
+
+“Is that your answer?” asked the major. Balked ambition is an ugly horse
+to ride. He had tried for a command but had been shelved.
+
+“I have sufficient authority,” said King, unruffled. He spoke as if he
+were thinking of something entirely different. His eyes were as if they
+saw the major from a very long way off and rather approved of him on the
+whole.
+
+“Show me your authority, please!”
+
+King dived into an inner pocket and produced a card that had about ten
+words written on its face, above a general's signature. Hyde read it and
+passed it back.
+
+“So you're one of those, are you!” he said in a tone of voice that would
+start a fight in some parts of the world and in some services. But
+King nodded cheerfully, and that annoyed the major more than ever; he
+snorted, closed his mouth with a snap and turned to rearrange the sheet
+and pillow on his berth.
+
+Then the train pulled out, amid a din of voices from the left-behind
+that nearly drowned the panting of overloaded engine. There was a roar
+of joy from the two coaches full of soldiers in the rear--a shriek from
+a woman who had missed the train--a babel of farewells tossed back and
+forth between the platform and the third-class carriages--and Peshawur
+fell away behind.
+
+King settled down on his side of the compartment, after a struggle with
+the thermantidote that refused to work. There was heat enough below the
+roof to have roasted meat, so that the physical atmosphere became as
+turgid as the mental after a little while.
+
+Hyde all but stripped himself and drew on striped pajamas. King was
+content to lie in shirt-sleeves on the other berth, with knees raised,
+so that Hyde could not overlook the general's papers. At his ease he
+studied them one by one, memorizing a string of names, with details as
+to their owners' antecedents and probable present whereabouts. There
+were several photographs in the packet, and he studied them very
+carefully indeed.
+
+But much most carefully of all he examined Yasmini's portrait, returning
+to it again and again. He reached the conclusion in the end that when it
+was taken she had been cunningly disguised.
+
+“This was intended for purpose of identification at a given time and
+place,” he told himself.
+
+“Were you muttering at me?” asked Hyde.
+
+“No, sir.”
+
+“It looked extremely like it!”
+
+“My mistake, sir. Nothing of the sort intended.”
+
+“H-rrrrr-ummmmmph!”
+
+Hyde turned an indignant back on him, and King studied the back as if he
+found it interesting. On the whole he looked sympathetic, so it was as
+well that Hyde did not look around. Balked ambition as a rule loathes
+sympathy.
+
+After many prickly-hot, interminable, jolting hours the train drew up at
+Rawal-Pindi station. Instantly King was on his feet with his tunic on,
+and he was out on the blazing hot platform before the train's motion had
+quite ceased.
+
+He began to walk up and down, not elbowing but percolating through the
+crowd, missing nothing worth noticing in all the hot kaleidoscope and
+seeming to find new amusement at every turn. It was not in the least
+astonishing that a well-dressed native should address him presently, for
+he looked genial enough to be asked to hold a baby. King himself did not
+seem surprised at all. Far from it; he looked pleased.
+
+“Excuse me, sir,” said the man in glib babu English. “I am seeking
+Captain King sahib, for whom my brother is veree anxious to be servant.
+Can you kindlee tell me, sir, where I could find Captain King sahib?”
+
+“Certainly,” King answered him. He looked glad to be of help. “Are you
+traveling on this train?”
+
+The question sounded like politeness welling from the lips of
+unsuspicion.
+
+“Yes, sir. I am traveling from this place where I have spent a few days,
+to Bombay, where my business is.
+
+“How did you know King sahib is on the train?” King asked him, smiling
+so genially that even the police could not have charged him with more
+than curiosity.
+
+“By telegram, sir. My brother had the misfortune to miss Captain King
+sahib at Peshawur and therefore sent a telegram to me asking me to do
+what I can at an interview.”
+
+“I see,” said King. “I see.” And judging by the sparkle in his eyes as
+he looked away he could see a lot. But the native could not see his eyes
+at that instant, although he tried to.
+
+He looked back at the train, giving the man a good chance to study his
+face in profile.
+
+“Oh, thank you, sir!” said the native oilily. “You are most kind! I am
+your humble servant, sir!”
+
+King nodded good-by to him, his dark eyes in the shadow of the khaki
+helmet seeming scarcely interested any longer.
+
+“Couldn't you find another berth?” Hyde asked him angrily when he
+stepped back into the compartment.
+
+“What were you out there looking for?”
+
+King smiled back at him blandly.
+
+“I think there are railway thieves on the train,” he announced without
+any effort at relevance. He might not have heard the question.
+
+“What makes you think so?”
+
+“Observation, sir.”
+
+“Oh! Then if you've seen thieves, why didn't you have 'em arrested? You
+were precious free with that authority of yours on Peshawur platform!”
+
+“Perhaps you'd care to take the responsibility, sir? Let me point out
+one of them.”
+
+Full of grudging curiosity Hyde came to stand by him, and King stepped
+back just as the train began to move.
+
+“That man, sir--over there--no, beyond him--there!”
+
+Hyde thrust head and shoulders through the window, and a well-dressed
+native with one foot on the running-board at the back end of the train
+took a long steady stare at him before jumping in and slamming the door
+of a third-class carriage.
+
+“Which one?” demanded Hyde impatiently.
+
+“I don't see him now, sir!”
+
+Hyde snorted and returned to his seat in the silence of unspeakable
+scorn. But presently he opened a suitcase and drew out a repeating
+pistol which he cocked carefully and stowed beneath his pillow; not at
+all a contemptible move, because the Indian railway thief is the most
+resourceful specialist in the world. But King took no overt precautions
+of any kind.
+
+After more interminable hours night shut down on them, red-hot,
+black-dark, mesmerically subdivided into seconds by the thump of
+carriage wheels and lit at intervals by showers of sparks from the
+gasping engine. The din of Babel rode behind the first-class carriages,
+for all the natives in the packed third-class talked all together.
+(In India, when one has spent a fortune on a third-class ticket, one
+proceeds to enjoy the ride.) The train was a Beast out of Revelation,
+wallowing in noise.
+
+But after other, hotter hours the talking ceased. Then King, strangely
+without kicking off his shoes, drew a sheet up over his shoulders. On
+the opposite berth Hyde covered his head, to keep dust out of his hair,
+and presently King heard him begin to snore gently. Then, very carefully
+he adjusted his own position so that his profile lay outlined in the dim
+light from the gas lamp in the roof. He might almost have been waiting
+to be shaved.
+
+The stuffiness increased to a degree that is sometimes preached in
+Christian churches as belonging to a sulphurous sphere beyond the grave.
+Yet he did not move a muscle. It was long after midnight when his vigil
+was rewarded by a slight sound at the door. From that instant his eyes
+were on the watch, under dark of closed lashes; but his even breathing
+was that of the seventh stage of sleep that knows no dreams.
+
+A click of the door-latch heralded the appearance of a hand. With skill,
+of the sort that only special training can develop, a man in native
+dress insinuated himself into the carriage without making another sound
+of any kind. King's ears are part of the equipment for his exacting
+business, but he could not hear the door click shut again.
+
+For about five minutes, while the train swayed head-long into Indian
+darkness, the man stood listening and watching King's face. He stood
+so near that King recognized him for the one who had accosted him on
+Rawal-Pindi platform. And he could see the outline of the knife-hilt
+that the man's fingers clutched underneath his shirt.
+
+“He'll either strike first, so as to kill us both and do the looting
+afterward--and in that case I think it will be easier to break his neck
+than his arm--yes, decidedly his neck; it's long and thin;--or--”
+
+His eyes feigned sleep so successfully that the native turned away at
+last.
+
+“Thought so!” He dared open his eyes a mite wider. “He's pukka--true to
+type! Rob first and then kill! Rule number one with his sort, run when
+you've stabbed! Not a bad rule either, from their point of view!”
+
+As he watched, the thief drew the sheet back from Hyde's face, with
+trained fingers that could have taken spectacles from the victims' nose
+without his knowledge. Then as fish glide in and out among the reeds
+without touching them, swift and soft and unseen, his fingers searched
+Hyde's body. They found nothing. So they dived under the pillow and
+brought out the pistol and a gold watch.
+
+After that he began to search the clothes that hung on a hook beside
+Hyde's berth. He brought forth papers and a pocketbook--then money.
+Money went into one bag--papers and pocketbook into another. And that
+was evidence enough as well as risk enough. The knife would be due in a
+minute.
+
+King moved in his sleep, rather noisily, and the movement knocked a book
+to the floor from the foot of his berth. The noise of that awoke Hyde,
+and King pretended to begin to wake, yawning and rolling on his back
+(that being much the safest position an unarmed man can take and much
+the most awkward for his enemy).
+
+“Thieves!” Hyde yelled at the top of his lungs, groping wildly for his
+pistol and not finding it.
+
+King sat up and rubbed his eyes. The native drew the knife,
+and--believing himself in command of the situation--hesitated for one
+priceless second. He saw his error and darted for the door too late.
+With a movement unbelievably swift King was there ahead of him; and with
+another movement not so swift, but much more disconcerting, he threw his
+sheet as the retiarius used to throw a net in ancient Rome. It wrapped
+round the native's head and arms, and the two went together to the floor
+in a twisted stranglehold.
+
+In another half-minute the native was groaning, for King had his
+knife-wrist in two hands and was bending it backward while he pressed
+the man's stomach with his knees.
+
+“Get his loot!” he panted between efforts.
+
+The knife fell to the floor, and the thief made a gallant effort
+to recover it, but King was too strong for him. He seized the knife
+himself, slipped it in his own bosom and resumed his hold before the
+native guessed what he was after. Then he kept a tight grip while
+Hyde knelt to grope for his missing property. The major found both the
+thief's bags, and held them up.
+
+“I expect that's all,” said King, loosening his grip very gradually.
+The native noticed--as Hyde did not--that King had begun to seem almost
+absent-minded; the thief lay quite still, looking up, trying to divine
+his next intention. Suddenly the brakes went on, but King's grip did not
+tighten. The train began to scream itself to a standstill at a wayside
+station, and King (the absent-minded)--very nearly grinned.
+
+“If I weren't in such an infernal hurry to reach Bombay--” Hyde
+grumbled; and King nearly laughed aloud then, for the thief knew
+English, and was listening with all his ears, “--may I be damned if I
+wouldn't get off at this station and wait to see that scoundrel brought
+to justice!”
+
+The train jerked itself to a standstill, and a man with a lantern began
+to chant the station's name.
+
+“Damn it!--I'm going to Bombay to act censor. I can't wait--they want me
+there.”
+
+The instant the train's motion altogether ceased the heat shut in on
+them as if the lid of Tophet had been slammed. The prickly heat burst
+out all over Hyde's skin and King's too.
+
+“Almighty God!” gasped Hyde, beginning to fan himself.
+
+There was plenty of excuse for relaxing hold still further, and King
+made full use of it. A second later he gave a very good pretense of pain
+in his finger-ends as the thief burst free. The native made a dive
+at his bosom for the knife, but he frustrated that. Then he made a
+prodigious effort, just too late, to clutch the man again, and he did
+succeed in tearing loose a piece of shirt; but the fleeing robber must
+have wondered, as he bolted into the blacker shadows of the station
+building, why such an iron-fingered, wide-awake sahib should have made
+such a truly feeble showing at the end.
+
+“Damn it!--couldn't you hold him? Were you afraid of him, or what?”
+ demanded Hyde, beginning to dress himself. Instead of answering, King
+leaned out into the lamp-lit gloom, and in a minute he caught sight of a
+sergeant of native infantry passing down the train. He made a sign that
+brought the man to him on the run.
+
+“Did you see that runaway?” he asked.
+
+“Ha, sahib. I saw one running. Shall I follow?”
+
+“No. This piece of his shirt will identify him. Take it. Hide it! When
+a man with a torn shirt, into which that piece fits, makes for the
+telegraph office after this train has gone on, see that he is allowed to
+send any telegrams he wants to! Only, have copies of every one of them
+wired to Captain King, care of the station-master, Delhi. Have you
+understood?”
+
+“Ha, sahib.”
+
+“Grab him, and lock him up tight afterward--but not until he has sent
+his telegrams!'
+
+“Atcha, sahib.”
+
+“Make yourself scarce, then!”
+
+Major Hyde was dressed, having performed that military evolution in
+something less than record time.
+
+“Who was that you were talking to?” he demanded. But King continued to
+look out the door.
+
+Hyde came and tapped on his shoulder impatiently, but King did not seem
+to understand until the native sergeant had quite vanished into the
+shadows.
+
+“Let me pass, will you!” Hyde demanded. “I'll have that thief caught if
+the train has to wait a week while they do it!”
+
+He pushed past, but he was scarcely on the step when the station-master
+blew his whistle, and his colored minion waved a lantern back and forth.
+The engine shrieked forthwith of death and torment; carriage doors
+slammed shut in staccato series; the heat relaxed as the engine
+moved--loosened--let go--lifted at last, and a trainload of hot
+passengers sighed thanks to an unresponsive sky as the train gained
+speed and wind crept in through the thermantidotes.
+
+Only through the broken thermantidote in King's compartment no wet
+air came. Hyde knelt on King's berth and wrestled with it like a caged
+animal, but with no result except that the sweat poured out all over him
+and he was more uncomfortable than before.
+
+“What are you looking at?” he demanded at last, sitting on King's berth.
+His head swam. He had to wait a few seconds before he could step across
+to his own side.
+
+“Only a knife,” said King. He was standing under the dim gas lamp that
+helped make the darkness more unbearable.
+
+“Not that robber's knife? Did he drop it?”
+
+“It's my knife,” said King.
+
+“Strange time to stand staring at it, if it's yours! Didn't you ever see
+it before?”
+
+King stowed the knife away in his bosom, and the major crossed to his
+own side.
+
+“I'm thinking I'll know it again, at all events!” King answered, sitting
+down. “Good night, sir.”
+
+“Good night.”
+
+Within ten minutes Hyde was asleep, snoring prodigiously. Then King
+pulled out the knife again and studied it for half an hour. The blade
+was of bronze, with an edge hammered to the keenness of a razor. The
+hilt was of nearly pure gold, in the form of a woman dancing.
+
+The whole thing was so exquisitely wrought that age had only softened
+the lines, without in the least impairing them. It looked like one of
+those Grecian toys with which Roman women of Nero's day stabbed their
+lovers. But that was not why he began to whistle very softly to himself.
+
+Presently he drew out the general's package of papers, with the
+photograph on the top. He stood up, to hold both knife and papers close
+to the light in the roof.
+
+It needed no great stretch of imagination to suggest a likeness between
+the woman of the photograph and the other, of the golden knife-hilt.
+And nobody, looking at him then, would have dared suggest he lacked
+imagination.
+
+If the knife had not been so ancient they might have been portraits of
+the same woman, in the same disguise, taken at the same time.
+
+“She knew I had been chosen to work with her. The general sent her word
+that I am coming,” he muttered to himself. “Man number one had a try for
+me, but I had him pinched too soon. There must have been a spy watching
+at Peshawur, who wired to Rawal-Pindi for this man to jump the train and
+go on with the job. She must have had him planted at Rawal-Pindi in case
+of accidents. She seems thorough! Why should she give the man a knife
+with her own portrait on it? Is she queen of a secret society? Well--we
+shall see!”
+
+He sat down on his berth again and sighed, not discontentedly. Then
+he lit one of his great black cigars and blew rings for five or six
+minutes. Then he lay back with his head on the pillow, and before five
+minutes more had gone he was asleep, with the cold cigar still clutched
+between his fingers.
+
+He looked as interesting in his sleep as when awake. His mobile face in
+repose looked Roman, for the sun had tanned his skin and his nose was
+aquiline. In museums, where sculptured heads of Roman generals and
+emperors stand around the wall on pedestals, it would not be difficult
+to pick several that bore more than a faint resemblance to him. He had
+breadth and depth of forehead and a jowl that lent itself to smiles as
+well as sternness, and a throat that expressed manly determination in
+every molded line.
+
+He slept like a boy until dawn; and he and Hyde had scarcely exchanged
+another dozen words when the train screamed next day into Delhi station.
+Then he saluted stiffly and was gone.
+
+“Young jackanapes!” Hyde muttered after him. “Lazy young devil! He ought
+to be with his regiment, marching and setting a good example to his men!
+We'll have our work cut out to win this war, if there are many of his
+stamp! And I'm afraid there are--I'm afraid so--far too many of 'em!
+Pity! Such a pity! If the right men were at the top the youngsters
+at the foot of the ladder would mind their P's and Q's. As it is, I'm
+afraid we shall get beaten in this show. Dear, oh, dear!”
+
+Being what he was, and consistent before all things, Major Hyde drew
+out his writing materials there and then and wrote a report against
+Athelstan King, which he signed, addressed to headquarters and mailed at
+the first opportunity. There some future historian may find it and draw
+from it unkind deductions on the morale of the British army.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+
+
+     The only things which can not be explained are facts.  So,
+     use 'em. A riddle is proof there is a key to it.  Nor is it
+     a riddle when you've got the key. Life is as simple as all
+     that.--Cocker
+
+
+Delhi boasts a round half-dozen railway stations, all of them designed
+with regard to war, so that to King there was nothing unexpected in the
+fact that the train had brought him to an unexpected station. He
+plunged into its crowd much as a man in the mood might plunge into a
+whirlpool,--laughing as he plunged, for it was the most intoxicating
+splurge of color, din and smell that even India, the many-peopled--even
+Delhi, mother of dynasties--ever had evolved.
+
+The station echoed--reverberated--hummed. A roar went up of human
+voices, babbling in twenty tongues, and above that rose in differing
+degrees the ear-splitting shriek of locomotives, the blare of bugles,
+the neigh of led horses, the bray of mules, the jingle of gun-chains and
+the thundering cadence of drilled feet.
+
+At one minute the whole building shook to the thunder of a grinning
+regiment; an instant later it clattered to the wrought-steel hammer of a
+thousand hoofs, as led troop-horses danced into formation to invade the
+waiting trucks. Loaded trucks banged into one another and thunderclapped
+their way into the sidings. And soldiers of nearly every Indian military
+caste stood about everywhere, in what was picturesque confusion to the
+uninitiated, yet like the letters of an index to a man who knew. And
+King knew. Down the back of each platform Tommy Atkins stood in long
+straight lines, talking or munching great sandwiches or smoking.
+
+The heat smelt and felt of another world. The din was from the same
+sphere. Yet everywhere was hope and geniality and by-your-leave as if
+weddings were in the wind and not the overture to death.
+
+Threading his way in and out among the motley swarm with a
+great black cheroot between his teeth and sweat running into
+his eyes from his helmet-band, Athelstan King strode at ease--at
+home--intent--amused--awake--and almost awfully happy. He was not in the
+least less happy because perfectly aware that a native was following him
+at a distance, although he did wonder how the native had contrived to
+pass within the lines.
+
+The general at Peshawur had compressed about a ton of miscellaneous
+information into fifteen hurried minutes, but mostly he had given him
+leave and orders to inform himself; so the fun was under way of winning
+exact knowledge in spite of officers, not one of whom would not have
+grown instantly suspicions at the first asked question. At the end of
+fifteen minutes there was not a glib staff-officer there who could have
+deceived him as to the numbers and destination of the force entraining.
+
+“Kerachi!” he told himself, chewing the butt of his cigar and keeping
+well ahead of the shadowing native. Always keep a “shadow” moving until
+you're ready to deal with him is one of Cocker's very soundest rules.
+
+“Turkey hasn't taken a hand yet--the general said so. No holy war yet.
+These'll be held in readiness to cross to Basra in case the Turks
+begin. While they wait for that at Kerachi the tribes won't dare begin
+anything. One or two spies are sure to break North and tell them what
+this force is for--but the tribes won't believe. They'll wait until the
+force has moved to Basra before they take chances. Good! That means no
+especial hurry for me!”
+
+He did not have to return salutes, because he did not look for them.
+Very few people noticed him at all, although he was recognized once
+or twice by former messmates, and one officer stopped him with an
+out-stretched hand.
+
+“Shake hands, you old tramp! Where are you bound for next? Tibet by any
+chance--or is it Samarkand this time?”
+
+“Oh, hullo, Carmichel!” he answered, beaming instant good-fellowship.
+“Where are you bound for?” And the other did not notice that his own
+question had not been answered.
+
+“Bombay! Bombay--Marseilles--Brussels--Berlin!”
+
+“Wish you luck!” laughed King, passing on. Every living man there, with
+the exception of a few staff-officers, believed himself en route for
+Europe; their faces said as much. Yet King took another look at the
+piles of stores and at the kits the men carried.
+
+“Who'd take all that stuff to Europe, where they make it?” he reflected.
+“And what 'u'd they use camel harness for in France?”
+
+At his leisure--in his own way, that was devious and like a string of
+miracles--he filtered toward the telegraph office. The native who had
+followed him all this time drew closer, but he did not let himself be
+troubled by that.
+
+He whispered proof of his identity to the telegraph clerk, who was a
+Royal Engineer, new to that job that morning, and a sealed telegram was
+handed to him at once. The “shadow” came very close indeed, presumably
+to try and read over his shoulder from behind, but he side-stepped into
+a corner and read the telegram with his back to the wall.
+
+It was in English, no doubt to escape suspicion; and because it was
+war-time, and the censorship had closed on India like a throttling
+string, it was not in code. So the wording, all things considered, had
+to be ingenious, for the Mirza Ali, of the Fort, Bombay, to whom it
+was addressed, could scarcely be expected to read more than between the
+lines. The lines had to be there to read between.
+
+“Cattle intended for slaughter,” it ran, “despatched Bombay on Fourteen
+down. Meet train. Will be inspected en route, but should be dealt with
+carefully, on arrival. Cattle inclined to stampede owing to bad scare
+received to North of Delhi. Take all precautions and notify Abdul.” It
+was signed “Suliman.”
+
+“Good!” he chuckled. “Let's hope we get Abdul too. I wonder who he is!”
+
+Still uninterested in the man who shadowed him, he walked back to the
+office window and wrote two telegrams; one to Bombay, ordering the
+arrest of Ali Mirza of the Fort, with an urgent admonition to discover
+who his man Abdul might be, and to seize him as soon as found; the other
+to the station in the north, insisting on close confinement for Suliman.
+
+“Don't let him out on any terms at all!” he wired.
+
+That being all the urgent business, he turned leisurely to face his
+shadow, and the native met his eyes with the engaging frankness of an
+old friend, coming forward with outstretched hand. They did not shake
+hands, for King knew better than to fall into the first trap offered
+him. But the man made a signal with his fingers that is known to not
+more than a dozen men in all the world, and that changed the situation
+altogether.
+
+“Walk with me,” said King, and the man fell into stride beside him.
+
+He was a Rangar,--which is to say a Rajput who, or whose ancestors had
+turned Muhammadan. Like many Rajputs he was not a big man, but he looked
+fit and wiry; his head scarcely came above the level of King's chin,
+although his turban distracted attention from the fact. The turban was
+of silk and unusually large.
+
+The whitest of well-kept teeth, gleaming regularly under a little black
+waxed mustache betrayed no trace of betel-nut or other nastiness, and
+neither his fine features nor his eyes suggested vice of the sort that
+often undermines the character of Rajput youth.
+
+On second thoughts, and at the next opportunity to see them, King was
+not so sure that the eyes were brown, and he changed his opinion about
+their color a dozen times within the hour. Once he would even have sworn
+they were green.
+
+The man was well-to-do, for his turban was of costly silk, and he was
+clad in expensive jodpur riding breeches and spurred black riding boots,
+all perfectly immaculate. The breeches, baggy above and tight, below,
+suggested the clean lines of cat-like agility and strength.
+
+The upper part of his costume was semi-European. He was a regular Rangar
+dandy, of the type that can be seen playing polo almost any day at
+Mount Abu--that gets into mischief with a grace due to practise and
+heredity--but that does not manage its estates too well, as a rule, nor
+pay its debts in a hurry.
+
+“My name is Rewa Gunga,” he said in a low voice, looking up sidewise at
+King a shade too guilelessly. Between Cape Comorin and the Northern Ice
+guile is normal, and its absence makes the wise suspicious.
+
+“I am Captain King.”
+
+“I have a message for you.”
+
+“From whom?”
+
+“From her!” said the Rangar, and without exactly knowing why, or being
+pleased with himself, King felt excited.
+
+They were walking toward the station exit. King had a trunk check in
+his hand, but returned it to pocket, not proposing just yet to let this
+Rangar over-hear instructions regarding the trunk's destination; he was
+too good-looking and too overbrimming with personal charm to be trusted
+thus early in the game. Besides, there was that captured knife, that
+hinted at lies and treachery. Secret signs as well as loot have been
+stolen before now.
+
+“I'd like to walk through the streets and see the crowd.”
+
+He smiled as he said that, knowing well that the average young Rajput of
+good birth would rather fight a tiger with cold steel than walk a mile
+or two. He drew fire at once.
+
+“Why walk, King sahib? Are we animals? There is a carriage waiting--her
+carriage--and a coachman whose ears were born dead. We might be
+overheard in the street. Are you and I children, tossing stones into a
+pool to watch the rings widen!”
+
+“Lead on, then,” answered King.
+
+Outside the station was a luxuriously modern victoria, with C springs
+and rubber tires, with horses that would have done credit to a viceroy.
+The Rangar motioned King to get in first, and the moment they were both
+seated the Rajput coachman set the horses to going like the wind. Rewa
+Gunga opened a jeweled cigarette case.
+
+“Will you have one?” he asked with the air of royalty entertaining a
+blood-equal.
+
+King accepted a cigarette for politeness' sake and took occasion to
+admire the man's slender wrist, that was doubtless hard and strong as
+woven steel, but was not much more than half the thickness of his own.
+
+The Rajputs as a race are proud of their wrists and hands. Their swords
+are made with a hilt so small that none save a Rajput of the blood could
+possibly use one; yet there is no race in all warring India, nor any
+in the world, that bears a finer record for hard fighting and sheer
+derring-do. One of the questions that occurred to King that minute was
+why this well-bred youngster whose age he guessed at twenty-two or so
+had not turned his attention to the army.
+
+“My height!”
+
+The man had read his thoughts!
+
+“Not quite tall enough. Besides--you are a soldier, are you not? And do
+you fight?”
+
+He nodded toward a dozen water-buffaloes, that slouched along the street
+with wet goatskin mussuks slung on their blue flanks.
+
+“They can fight,” he said smiling. “So can any other fool!” Then, after
+a minute of rather strained silence: “My message is from her.”
+
+“From Yasmini?”
+
+“Who else?”
+
+King accepted the rebuke with a little inclination of the head. He spoke
+as little as possible, because he was puzzled. He had become conscious
+of a puzzled look in the Rangar's eyes--of a subtle wonderment that
+might be intentional flattery (for Art and the East are one). Whenever
+the East is doubtful, and recognizes doubt, it is as dangerous as a
+hillside in the rains, and it only added to his problem if the Rangar
+found in him something inexplicable. The West can only get the better of
+the East when the East is too cock-sure.
+
+“She has jolly well gone North!” said the Rangar suddenly, and King
+shut his teeth with a snap. He sat bolt upright, and the Rangar allowed
+himself to look amused.
+
+“When? Why?”
+
+“She was too jolly well excited to wait, sahib! She is of the North,
+you know. She loves the North, and the men of the 'Hills'; and she knows
+them because she loves them. There came a tar (telegram) from Peshawur,
+from a general, to say King sahib comes to Delhi; but already she had
+completed all arrangements here. She was in a great stew, I can assure
+you. Finally she said, 'Why should I wait?' Nobody could answer her.”
+
+He spoke English well enough. Few educated foreign gentlemen could have
+spoken it better, although there was the tendency to use slang that
+well-bred natives insist on picking up from British officers; and as he
+went on, here and there the native idiom crept through, translated. King
+said nothing, but listened and watched, puzzled more than he would
+have cared to admit by the look in the Rangar's eyes. It was not
+suspicion--nor respect. Yet there was a suggestion of both.
+
+“At last she said, 'It is well; I will not wait! I know of this sahib.
+He is a man whose feet stand under him and he will not tread my growing
+flowers into garbage! He will be clever enough to pick up the end of
+the thread that I shall leave behind and follow it and me! He is a true
+hound, with a nose that reads the wind, or the general sahib never would
+have sent him!' So she left me behind, sahib, to--to present to you the
+end of the thread of which she spoke.”
+
+King tossed away the stump of the cigarette and rolled his tongue round
+the butt of a fresh cheroot. The word “hound” is not necessarily a
+compliment in any of a thousand Eastern tongues and gains little by
+translation. It might have been a slip, but the East takes advantage of
+its own slips as well as of other peoples' unless watched.
+
+The carriage swayed at high speed round three sharp corners in
+succession before the Rangar spoke again.
+
+“She has often heard of you,” he said then. That was not unlikely, but
+not necessarily true either. If it were true, it did not help to account
+for the puzzled look in the Rangar's eyes, that increased rather than
+diminished.
+
+“I've heard of her,” said King.
+
+“Of course! Who has not? She has desired to meet you, sahib, ever since
+she was told you are the best man in your service.”
+
+King grunted, thinking of the knife beneath his shirt.
+
+“She is very glad that you and she are on the same errand.” He leaned
+forward for the sake of emphasis and laid a finger on King's hand. It
+was a delicate, dainty finger with an almond nail. “She is very glad.
+She is far more glad than you imagine, or than you would believe. King
+sahib, she is all bucked up about it! Listen--her web is wide! Her
+agents are here--there--everywhere, and she is obeyed as few kings have
+ever been! Those agents shall all be held answerable for your life,
+sahib,--for she has said so! They are one and all your bodyguard, from
+now forward!”
+
+King inclined his head politely, but the weight of the knife inside
+his shirt did not encourage credulity. True, it might not be Yasmini's
+knife, and the Rangar's emphatic assurance might not be an unintentional
+admission that the man who had tried to use it was Yasmini's man. But
+when a man has formed the habit of deduction, he deduces as he goes
+along, and is prone to believe what his instinct tells him.
+
+Again, it was as if the Rangar read a part of his thoughts, if not all
+of them. It is not difficult to counter that trick, but to do it a man
+must be on his guard, or the East will know what he has thought and what
+he is going to think, as many have discovered when it was too late.
+
+“Her men are able to protect anybody's life from any God's number of
+assassins, whatever may lead you to think the contrary. From now forward
+your life is in her men's keeping!”
+
+“Very good of her; I'm sure,” King murmured. He was thinking of the
+general's express order to apply for a “passport” that would take him
+into Khinjan Caves--mentally cursing the necessity for asking any kind
+of favor,--and wondering whether to ask this man for it or wait until he
+should meet Yasmini. He had about made up his mind that to wait would
+be quite within a strict interpretation of his orders, as well as
+infinitely more agreeable to himself, when the Rangar answered his
+thoughts again as if he had spoken them aloud.
+
+“She left this with me, saying I am to give it to you! I am to say that
+wherever you wear it, between here and Afghanistan, your life shall be
+safe and you may come and go!”
+
+King stared. The Rangar drew a bracelet from an inner pocket and held it
+out. It was a wonderful, barbaric thing of pure gold, big enough for a
+grown man's wrist, and old enough to have been hammered out in the very
+womb of time. It looked almost like ancient Greek, and it fastened with
+a hinge and clasp that looked as if they did not belong to it, and might
+have been made by a not very skillful modern jeweler.
+
+“Won't you wear it?” asked Rewa Gunga, watching him. “It will prove a
+true talisman! What was the name of the Johnny who had a lamp to rub?
+Aladdin? It will be better than what he had! He could only command a lot
+of bogies. This will give you authority over flesh and blood! Take it,
+sahib!”
+
+So King put it on, letting it slip up his sleeve, out of sight,--with
+a sensation as the snap closed of putting handcuffs on himself. But the
+Rangar looked relieved.
+
+“That is your passport, sahib! Show it to a Hill-man whenever you
+suppose yourself in danger. The Raj might go to pieces, but while
+Yasmini lives--”
+
+“Her friends will boast about her, I suppose!”
+
+King finished the sentence for him because it is not considered good
+form for natives to hint at possible dissolution of the Anglo-Indian
+Government. Everybody knows that the British will not govern India
+forever, but the British--who know it best of all, and work to that end
+most fervently--are the only ones encouraged to talk about it.
+
+For a few minutes after that Rewa Gunga held his peace, while the
+carriage swayed at breakneck speed through the swarming streets. They
+had to drive slower in the Chandni Chowk, for the ancient Street of the
+Silversmiths that is now the mart of Delhi was ablaze with crude colors,
+and was thronged with more people than ever since '57. There were a
+thousand signs worth studying by a man who could read them.
+
+King, watching and saying nothing, reached the conclusion that Delhi was
+in hand--excited undoubtedly, more than a bit bewildered, watchful,
+but in hand. Without exactly knowing how he did it, he grew aware of a
+certain confidence that underlay the surface fuss. After that the sea
+of changing patterns and raised voices ceased to have any particular
+interest for him and he lay back against the cushions to pay stricter
+attention to his own immediate affairs.
+
+He did not believe for a second the lame explanation Yasmini had left
+behind. She must have some good reason for wishing to be first up the
+Khyber, and he was very sorry indeed she had slipped away. It might be
+only jealousy, yet why should she be jealous? It might be fear--yet why
+should she be afraid?
+
+It was the next remark of the Rangar's that set him entirely on his
+guard, and thenceforward whoever could have read his thoughts would have
+been more than human. Perhaps it is the most dominant characteristic of
+the British race that it will not defend itself until it must. He had
+known of that thought-reading trick ever since his ayah (native
+nurse) taught him to lisp Hindustanee; just as surely he knew that its
+impudent, repeated use was intended to sap his belief in himself. There
+is not much to choose between the native impudence that dares intrude on
+a man's thoughts, and the insolence that understands it, and is rather
+too proud to care.
+
+“I'll bet you a hundred dibs,” said the Rangar, “that she jolly well
+didn't fancy your being on the scene ahead of her! I'll bet you she
+decided to be there first and get control of the situation! Take me?
+You'd lose if you did! She's slippery, and quick, and like all Women,
+she's jealous!”
+
+The Rangar's eyes were on his, but King was not to be caught again.
+It is quite easy to think behind a fence, so to speak, if one gives
+attention to it.
+
+“She will be busy presently fooling those Afridis,” he continued, waving
+his cigarette. “She has fooled them always, to the limit of their bally
+bent. They all believe she is their best friend in the world--oh, dear
+Yes, you bet they do! And so she is--so she is--but not in the way they
+think! They believe she plots with them against the Raj! Poor silly
+devils! Yet Yasmini loves them! They want war--blood--loot! It is all
+they think about! They are seldom satisfied unless their wrists and
+elbows are bally well red with other peoples' gore! And while they
+are picturing the loot, and the slaughter of unbelievers--(as if they
+believed anything but foolishness themselves!)--Yasmini plays her own
+game, for amusement and power--a good game--a deep game! You have seen
+already how India has to ask her aid in the 'Hills'! She loves power,
+power, power--not for its name, for names are nothing, but to use
+it. She loves the feel of it! Fighting is not power! Blood-letting
+is foolishness. If there is any blood spilt it is none of her
+doing--unless--”
+
+“Unless what?” asked King.
+
+“Oh--sometimes there were fools who interfered. You can not blame her
+for that.”
+
+“You seem to be a champion of hers! How long have you known her?”'
+
+The Rangar eyed him sharply.
+
+“A long time. She and I played together when we were children. I know
+her whole history--and that is something nobody else in the world knows
+but she herself. You see, I am favored. It is because she knows me very
+well that she chose me to travel North with you, when you start to find
+her in the 'Hills'!”
+
+King cleared his throat, and the Rangar nodded, looking into his eyes
+with the engaging confidence of a child who never has been refused
+anything, in or out of reason. King made no effort to look pleased, so
+the Rangar drew on his resources.
+
+“I have a letter from her,” he stated blandly.
+
+From a pocket in the carriage cushions he brought out a silver tube,
+richly carved in the Kashmiri style and closed at either end with a
+tightly fitting silver cap. King accepted it and drew the cap from one
+end. A roll of scented paper fell on his lap, and a puff of hot wind
+combined with a lurch of the carriage springs came near to lose it
+for him; he snatched it just in time and unrolled it to find a letter
+written to himself in Urdu, in a beautiful flowing hand.
+
+Urdu is perhaps the politest of written tongues and lends itself most
+readily to indirectness; but since he did not expect to read a catalogue
+of exact facts, he was not disappointed.
+
+Translated, the letter ran:
+
+        “To Athelstan King sahib, by the hand of Rewa Gunga.
+        Greeting.  The bearer is my well-trusted servant, whom
+        I have chosen to be the sahib's guide until Heaven
+        shall be propitious and we meet.  He is instructed
+        in all that he need know concerning what is now in hand,
+        and he will tell by word of mouth such things as ought
+        not to be written.  By all means let Rewa Gunga travel
+        with you, for he is of royal blood, of the House of
+        Ketchwaha and will not fail you.  His honor and mine
+        are one.  Praying that the many gods of India may heap
+        honors on your honor's head, providing each his proper
+        attribute toward entire ability to succeed in all things,
+        but especially in the present undertaking,
+
+        “I am Your Excellency's humble servant,
+        --Yasmini.”
+
+He had barely finished reading it when the coachman took a last corner
+at a gallop and drew the horses up on their haunches at a door in a high
+white wall. Rewa Gunga sprang out of the carriage before the horses were
+quite at a standstill.
+
+“Here we are!” he said, and King, gathering up the letter and the silver
+tube, noticed that the street curved here so that no other door and no
+window overlooked this one.
+
+He followed the Rangar, and he was no sooner into the shadow of the door
+than the coachman lashed the horses and the carriage swung out of view.
+
+“This way,” said the Rangar over his shoulder. “Come!”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+
+     Lie to a liar, for lies are his coin.
+     Steal from a thief, for that is easy.
+     Set a trap for a trickster, and catch him at the first attempt.
+     But beware of the man who has no axe to grind.
+     --Eastern Proverb
+
+
+It was a musty smelling entrance, so dark that to see was scarcely
+possible after the hot glare outside. Dimly King made out Rewa Gunga
+mounting stairs to the left and followed him. The stairs wound backward
+and forward on themselves four times, growing scarcely any lighter as
+they ascended, until, when he guessed himself two stories at least above
+road level, there was a sudden blaze of reflected light and he blinked
+at more mirrors than he could count. They had been swung on hinges
+suddenly to throw the light full in his face.
+
+There were curtains reflected in each mirror, and little glowing lamps,
+so cunningly arranged that it was not possible to guess which were
+real and which were not. Rewa Gunga offered no explanation, but stood
+watching with quiet amusement. He seemed to expect King to take a chance
+and go forward, but if he did he reckoned without his guest. King stood
+still.
+
+Then suddenly, as if she had done it a thousand times before and
+surprised a thousand people, a little nut-brown maid parted the middle
+pair of curtains and said “Salaam!” smiling with teeth that were as
+white as porcelain. All the other curtains parted too, so that the
+whereabouts of the door might still have been in doubt had she not
+spoken and so distinguished herself from her reflections. King looked
+scarcely interested and not at all disturbed.
+
+Balked of his amusement, Rewa Gunga hurried past him, thrusting the
+little maid aside, and led the way. King followed him into a long room,
+whose walls were hung with richer silks than any he remembered to have
+seen. In a great wide window to one side some twenty women began at
+once to make flute music.
+
+Silken punkahs swung from chains, wafting back and forth a cloud of
+sandalwood smoke that veiled the whole scene in mysterious, scented
+mist. Through the open window came the splash of a fountain and the
+chattering of birds, and the branch of a feathery tree drooped near by.
+It seemed that the long white wall below was that of Yasmini's garden.
+
+“Be welcome!” laughed Rewa Gunga; “I am to do the honors, since she is
+not here. Be seated, sahib.”
+
+King chose a divan at the room's farthest end, near tall curtains that
+led into rooms beyond. He turned his back toward the reason for his
+choice. On a little ivory-inlaid ebony table about ten feet away lay a
+knife, that was almost the exact duplicate of the one inside his shirt.
+Bronze knives of ancient date, with golden handles carved to represent a
+woman dancing, are rare. The ability to seem not to notice incriminating
+evidence is rarer still--rarest of all when under the eyes of a native
+of India, for cats and hawks are dullards by comparison to them. But
+King saw the knife, yet did not seem to see it.
+
+There was nothing there calculated to set an Englishman at ease. In
+spite of the Rangar's casual manner, Yasmini's reception room felt
+like the antechamber to another world, where mystery is atmosphere and
+ordinary air to breathe is not at all. He could sense hushed expectancy
+on every side--could feel the eyes of many women fixed on him--and began
+to draw on his guard as a fighting man draws on armor. There and then he
+deliberately set himself to resist mesmerism, which is the East's chief
+weapon.
+
+Rewa Gunga, perfectly at home, sprawled leisurely, along a cushioned
+couch with a grace that the West has not learned yet; but King did not
+make the mistake of trusting him any better for his easy manners, and
+his eyes sought swiftly for some unrhythmic, unplanned thing on which to
+rest, that he might save himself by a sort of mental leverage.
+
+Glancing along the wall that faced the big window, he noticed for the
+first time a huge Afridi, who sat on a stool and leaned back against the
+silken hangings with arms folded.
+
+“Who is that man?” he asked.
+
+“He? Oh, he is a savage--just a big savage,” said Rewa Gunga, looking
+vaguely annoyed.
+
+“Why is he here?”
+
+He did not dare let go of this chance side-issue. He knew that Rewa
+Gunga wished him to talk of Yasmini and to ask questions about her, and
+that if he succumbed to that temptation all his self-control would be
+cunningly sapped away from him until his secrets, and his very senses,
+belonged to some one else.
+
+“What is he doing here?” he insisted.
+
+“He? Oh, he does nothing. He waits,” purred the Rangar. “He is to be
+your body-servant on your journey to the North. He is nothing--nobody at
+all!--except that he is to be trusted utterly because he loves Yasmini.
+He is Obedience! A big obedient fool! Let him be!”
+
+“No,” said King. “If he's to be my man I'll speak to him!”
+
+He felt himself winning. Already the spell of the room was lifting, and
+he no longer felt the cloud of sandalwood smoke like a veil across his
+brain.
+
+“Won't you tell him to come here to me?”
+
+Rewa Gunga laughed, resting his silk turban against the wall hangings
+and clasping both hands about his knee. It was as a man might laugh who
+has been touched in a bout with foils.
+
+“Oh!--Ismail!” he called, with a voice like a bell, that made King
+stare.
+
+The Afridi seemed to come out of a deep sleep and looked bewildered,
+rubbing his eyes and feeling whether his turban was on straight. He
+combed his beard with nervous fingers as he gazed about him and caught
+Rewa Gunga's eye. Then he sprang to his feet.
+
+“Come!” ordered Rewa Gunga.
+
+The man obeyed.
+
+“Did you see?” Rewa Gunga chuckled. “He rose from his place like a
+buffalo, rump first and then shoulder after shoulder! Such men are safe!
+Such men have no guile beyond what will help them to obey! Such men
+think too slowly to invent deceit for its own sake!”
+
+The Afridi came and towered above them, standing with gnarled hands
+knotted into clubs.
+
+“What is thy name?” King asked him.
+
+“Ismail!” he boomed.
+
+“Thou art to be my servant?”
+
+“Aye! So said she. I am her man. I obey!”
+
+“When did she say so?” King asked him blandly, asking unexpected
+questions being half the art of Secret Service, although the other half
+is harder to achieve.
+
+The Hillman stroked his great beard and stood considering the question.
+One could almost imagine the click of slow machinery revolving in his
+mind, although King entertained a shrewd suspicion that he was not so
+stupid as he chose to seem. His eyes were too hawk-bright to be a stupid
+man's.
+
+“Before she went away,” he answered at last.
+
+“When did she go away?”
+
+He thought again, then “Yesterday,” he said.
+
+“Why did you wait before you answered?”
+
+The Afridi's eyes furtively sought Rewa Gunga's and found no aid there.
+Watching the Rangar less furtively, but even less obviously, King was
+aware that his eyes were nearly closed, as if they were not interested.
+The fingers that clasped his knee drummed on it indifferently, seeing
+which King allowed himself to smile.
+
+“Never mind,” he told Ismail. “It is no matter. It is ever well to think
+twice before speaking once, for thus mistakes die stillborn. Only the
+monkey-folk thrive on quick answers--is it not so? Thou art a man of
+many inches--of thew and sinew--Hey, but thou art a man! If the heart
+within those great ribs of thine is true as thine arms are strong I
+shall be fortunate to have thee for a servant!”
+
+“Aye!” said the Afridi. “But what are words? She has said I am thy
+servant, and to hear her is to obey!”
+
+“Then from now thou art my servant?”
+
+“Nay, but from yesterday when she gave the order!”
+
+“Good!” said King.
+
+“Aye, good for thee! May Allah do more to me if I fail!”
+
+“Then, take me a telegram!” said King.
+
+He began to write at once on a half-sheet of paper that he tore from a
+letter he had in his pocket, setting down a row of figures at the top
+and transposing into cypher as he went along.
+
+“Yasmini has gone North. Is there any reason at your end why I should
+not follow her at once?”
+
+He addressed it in plain English to his friend the general at Peshawur,
+taking great care lest the Rangar read it through those sleepy,
+half-closed eyes of his. Then he tore the cypher from the top, struck
+a match and burned the strip of paper and handed the code telegram to
+Ismail, directing him carefully to a government office where the cypher
+signature would be recognized and the telegram given precedence.
+
+Ismail stalked off with it, striding like Moses down from
+Sinai--hook-nose--hawk-eye--flowing beard--dignity and all, and King
+settled down to guard himself against the next attempt on his sovereign
+self-command.
+
+Now he chose to notice the knife on the ebony table as if he had not
+seen it before. He got up and reached for it and brought it back,
+turning it over and over in his hand.
+
+“A strange knife,” he said.
+
+“Yes,--from Khinjan,” said Rewa Gunga, and King eyed him as one wolf
+eyes another.
+
+“What makes you say it is from Khinjan?”
+
+“She brought it from Khinjan Caves herself! There is another knife that
+matches it, but that is not here. That bracelet you now wear, sahib, is
+from Khinjan Caves too! She has the secret of the Caves!”
+
+“I have heard that the 'Heart of the Hills' is there,” King answered.
+“Is the 'Heart of the Hills' a treasure house?”
+
+Rewa Gunga laughed.
+
+“Ask her, sahib! Perhaps she will tell you! Perhaps she will let you
+see! Who knows? She is a woman of resource and unexpectedness--Let her
+women dance for you a while.”
+
+King nodded. Then he got up and laid the knife back on the little table.
+A minute or so later he noticed that at a sign from Rewa Gunga a woman
+left the great window place and spirited the knife away.
+
+“May I have a sheet of paper?” he asked, for he knew that another fight
+for his self-command was due.
+
+Rewa Gunga gave an order, and a maid brought him scented paper on a
+silver tray. He drew out his own fountain pen then and made ready.
+
+In spite of the great silken punkah that swung rhythmically across the
+full breadth of the room the beat was so great that the pen slipped
+round and round between his fingers. Yet he contrived to write, and
+since his one object was to give his brain employment, he wrote down
+a list of the names he had memorized in the train on the journey from
+Peshawur, not thinking of a use for the list until he had finished.
+Then, though, a real use occurred to him.
+
+While he began to write more than a dozen dancing women swept into the
+room from behind the silk hangings in a concerted movement that was all
+lithe slumberous grace. Wood-wind music called to them from the great
+deep window as snakes are summoned from their holes, and as cobras
+answer the charmer's call the women glided to the center and stood
+poised beneath the punkah.
+
+There they began to chant, still dreamily, and with the chant the dance
+began, in and out, round and round, lazily, ever so lazily, wreathed in
+buoyant gossamer that was scarcely more solid than the sandalwood smoke
+they wafted into rings.
+
+King watched them and listened to their chant until he began to
+recognize the strain on the eye-muscles that precedes the mesmeric
+spell. Then he wrote and read what he had written and wrote again. And
+after that, for the sake of mental exercise, he switched his thoughts
+into another channel altogether. He reverted to Delhi railway station.
+
+“The Turks can spy as well as anybody.--They know those men are going to
+Kerachi to be ready for them.--Therefore, having cut his eye-teeth B.C.
+several hundred, the Unspeakable Turk will take care not to misbehave
+UNTIL he's ready. And I suppose our government, being ours and we being
+us, will let him do it! All of which will take time.--And that again
+means no trouble in the Hills--probably--until the Turks really do feel
+ready to begin. They'll preach a holy war just ahead of the date. The
+tribes will keep quiet because an army at Kerachi might be meant for
+their benefit. Oh, yes, I'm quite sure they were entraining for Kerachi
+in readiness to move on Basra.
+
+“Trucks ready for camels--and camel drivers--and food for camels--and
+Eresby, who's just come from taking a special camel course. Not a doubt
+of it!--And then, Corrigan--Elwright--Doby--Gould--all on the platform
+in a bunch, and all down on the Army List as Turkish interpreters! Not a
+doubt left!”
+
+“What have you written?” asked a quiet voice at his ear; and he turned
+to look straight in the eyes of Rewa Gunga, who had leaned forward to
+read over his shoulder. Just for one second he hovered on the brink of
+quick defeat. Having escaped the Scylla of the dancing women, Charybdis
+waited for him in the shape of eyes that were pools of hot mystery. It
+was the sound of his own voice that brought him back to the world again
+and saved his will for him unbound.
+
+“Read it, won't you?” he laughed. “If you know, take this pen and mark
+the names of whichever of those men are still in Delhi.”
+
+Rewa Gunga took pen and paper and set a mark against some thirty of the
+names, for King had a manner that disarmed refusal.
+
+“Where are the others?” he asked him, after a glance at it.
+
+“In jail, or else over the border.”
+
+“Already?”
+
+The Rangar nodded. “Trust Yasmini! She saw to that jolly well before she
+left Delhi! She would have stayed had there been anything more to do!”
+
+King began to watch the dance again, for it did not feel safe to look
+too long into the Rangar's eyes. It was not wise just then to look too
+long at anything, or to think too long on any one subject.
+
+“Ismail is slow about returning,” said the Rangar.
+
+“I wrote at the foot of the tar,” said King, “that they are to detain
+him there until the answer comes.”
+
+The Rangar's eyes blazed for a second and then grew cold again (as King
+did not fail to observe). He knew as well as the Rangar that not many
+men would have kept their will so unfettered in that room as to be able
+to give independent orders. He recognized resignation, temporary at
+least, in the Rangar's attitude of leaning back again to watch from
+under lowered eyelids. It was like being watched by a cat.
+
+All this while the women danced on, in time to wailing flute-music,
+until, it seemed from nowhere, a lovelier woman than any of them
+appeared in their midst, sitting cross-legged with a flat basket at her
+knees. She sat with arms raised and swayed from the waist as if in a
+delirium. Her arms moved in narrowing circles, higher and higher above
+the basket lid, and the lid began to rise. Nobody touched it, nor was
+there any string, but as it rose it swayed with sickening monotony.
+
+It was minutes before the bodies of two great king-cobras could be
+made out, moving against the woman's spangled dress. The basket lid was
+resting on their heads, and as the music and the chanting rose to a wild
+weird shriek the lid rose too, until suddenly the woman snatched the
+lid away and the snakes were revealed, with hoods raised, hissing the
+cobra's hate-song that is prelude to the poison-death.
+
+They struck at the woman, one after the other, and she leaped out of
+their range, swift and as supple as they. Instantly then she joined
+in the dance, with the snakes striking right and left at her. Left
+and right she swayed to avoid them, far more gracefully than a matador
+avoids the bull and courting a deadlier peril than he--poisonous, two to
+his one. As she danced she whirled both arms above her head and cried as
+the were-wolves are said to do on stormy nights.
+
+Some unseen hand drew a blind over the great window and an eerie
+green-and-golden light began to play from one end of the room, throwing
+the dancers into half-relief and deepening the mystery.
+
+Sweet strange scents were wafted in from under the silken hangings.
+The room grew cooler by unguessed means. Every sense was treacherously
+wooed. And ever, in the middle of the moving light among the languorous
+dancers, the snakes pursued the woman!
+
+“Do you do this often?” wondered King, in a calm aside to Rewa Gunga,
+turning half toward him and taking his eyes off the dance without any
+very great effort.
+
+Rewa Gunga clapped his hands and the dance ceased. The woman spirited
+her snakes away. The blind was drawn upward and in a moment all was
+normal again with the punkah swinging slowly overhead, except that the
+seductive smell remained, that was like the early-morning breath of all
+the different flowers of India.
+
+“If she were here,” said the Rangar, a little grimly--with a trace of
+disappointment in his tone--“you would not snatch your eyes away
+like that! You would have been jolly well transfixed, my friend!
+These--she--that woman--they are but clumsy amateurs! If she were here,
+to dance with her snakes for you, you would have been jolly well dancing
+with her, if she had wished it! Perhaps you shall see her dance some
+day! Ah,--here is Ismail,” he added in an altered tone of voice. He
+seemed relieved at sight of the Afridi.
+
+Bursting through the glass-bead curtains at the door, the great savage
+strode down the room, holding out a telegram. Rewa Gunga looked as if
+he would have snatched it, but King's hand was held out first and Ismail
+gave it to him. With a murmur of conventional apology King tore the
+envelope and in a second his eyes were ablaze with something more than
+wonder. A mystery, added to a mystery, stirred all the zeal in him. But
+in a second he had sweated his excitement down.
+
+“Read that, will you?” he said, passing it to Rewa Gunga. It was not in
+cypher, but in plain everyday English.
+
+“She has not gone North,” it ran. “She is still in Delhi. Suit your own
+movements to your plans.”
+
+“Can you explain?” asked King in a level voice. He was watching the
+Rangar narrowly, yet he could not detect the slightest symptom of
+emotion.
+
+“Explain?” said the Rangar. “Who can explain foolishness? It means that
+another fat general has made another fat mistake!”
+
+“What makes you so certain she went North?” King asked.
+
+Instead of answering, Rewa Gunga beckoned Ismail, who had stepped back
+out of hearing. The giant came and loomed over them like the Spirit of
+the Lamp of the Arabian Nights.
+
+“Whither went she?” asked the Rangar.
+
+“To the North!” he boomed.
+
+“How knowest thou?”
+
+“I saw her go!”
+
+“When went she?”
+
+“Yesterday, when a telegram came.”
+
+The word “came” was the only clue to his meaning, for in the language he
+used “yesterday” and “to-morrow” are the same word; such is the East's
+estimate of time.
+
+“By what route did she go?” asked Rewa Gunga.
+
+“By the terrain from the station.”
+
+“How knowest thou that?”
+
+“I was there, bearing her box of jewels.”
+
+“Didst thou see her buy the tikkut?”
+
+“Nay, I bought it, for she ordered me.”
+
+“For what destination was the tikkut?”
+
+“Peshawur!” said Ismail, filling his mouth with the word as if he loved
+it.
+
+“Yet”--it was King who spoke now, pointing an accusing finger at him--“a
+burra sahib sends a tar to me--this is it!--to say she is in Delhi
+still! Who told thee to answer those questions with those words?”
+
+“She!” the big man answered.
+
+“Yasmini?”
+
+“Aye! May Allah cover her with blessings!”
+
+“Ah!” said King. “You have my leave to depart out of earshot.”
+
+Then he turned on Rewa Gunga.
+
+“Whatever the truth of all this,” he said quietly, “I suppose it means
+she has done what there was to do in Delhi?”
+
+“Sahib,--trust her! Does a tigress hunt where no watercourses are, and
+where no game goes to drink? She follows the sambur!”
+
+“You are positive she has started for the North?”
+
+“Sahib, when she speaks it is best to believe! She told me she will go.
+Therefore I am ready to lead King sahib up the Khyber to her!”
+
+“Are you certain you can find her?”
+
+“Aye, sahib,--in the dark!”
+
+“There's a train leaves for the North to-night,” said King.
+
+The Rangar nodded.
+
+“You'll want a pass up the line. How many servants? Three--four--how
+many?”
+
+“One,” said the Rangar, and King was instantly suspicious of the modesty
+of that allowance; however he wrote out a pass for Rewa Gunga and one
+servant and gave it to him.
+
+“Be there on time and see about your own reservation,” he said. “I'll
+attend to Ismail's pass myself.”
+
+He folded the list of names that the Rangar had marked and wrote
+something on the back. Then he begged an envelope, and Rewa Gunga had
+one brought to him. He sealed the list in the envelope, addressed it and
+beckoned Ismail again.
+
+“Take this to Saunders sahib!” he ordered. “Go first to the telegraph
+office, where you were before, and the babu there will tell you where
+Saunders sahib may be found. Having found him, deliver the letter to
+him. Then come and find me at the Star of India Hotel and help me to
+bathe and change my clothes.”
+
+“To hear is to obey!” boomed Ismail, bowing; but his last glance was
+for Rewa Gunga, and he did not turn to go until he had met the Rangar's
+eyes.
+
+When Ismail had gone striding down the room, with no glance to spare
+for the whispering women in the window, and with dignity like an aura
+exuding from him, King looked into the Rangar's eyes with that engaging
+frankness of his that disarms so many people.
+
+“Then you'll be on the train to-night?” he asked.
+
+“To hear is to obey! With pleasure, sahib!”
+
+“Then good-by until this evening.”
+
+King bowed very civilly and walked out, rather unsteadily because his
+head ached. Probably nobody else, except the Rangar, could have guessed
+what an ordeal he had passed through or how near he had been to losing
+self-command.
+
+But as he felt his way down the stairs, that were dimly lighted now, he
+knew he had all his senses with him, for he “spotted” and admired the
+lurking places that had been designed for undoing of the unwary, or even
+the overwary. Yasmini's Delhi nest was like a hundred traps in one.
+
+“Almost like a pool table,” he reflected. “Pocket 'em at both ends and
+the middle!”
+
+In the street he found a gharry after a while and drove to his hotel.
+And before Ismail came he took a stroll through a bazaar, where he made
+a few strange purchases. In the hotel lobby he invested in a leather bag
+with a good lock, in which to put them. Later on Ismail came and proved
+himself an efficient body-servant.
+
+That evening Ismail carried the leather bag and found his place on the
+train, and that was not so difficult, because the trains running North
+were nearly empty, although the platforms were all crowded. As he stood
+at the carriage door with Ismail near him, a man named Saunders slipped
+through the crowd and sought him out.
+
+“Arrested 'em all!” he grinned.
+
+“Good.”
+
+“Seen anything of her? I recognized Yasmini's scent on your envelope.
+It's peculiar to her--one of her monopolies!”
+
+“No. I'm told she went North yesterday.”
+
+“Not by train, she didn't! It's my business to know that!”
+
+King did not answer; nor did he look surprised. He was watching Rewa
+Gunga, followed by a servant, hurrying to a reserved compartment at the
+front end of the train. The Rangar waved to him and he waved back.
+
+“I'd know her in a million!” vowed Saunders. “I can take oath she hasn't
+gone anywhere by train! Unless she has walked, or taken a carriage,
+she's in Delhi!”
+
+The engine gave a preliminary shriek and the giant Ismail nudged King's
+elbow in impatient warning. There was no more sign of Rewa Gunga, who
+had evidently settled down in his compartment for the night.
+
+“Get my bag out again!” King ordered, and Ismail stared.
+
+“Get out my bag, I said!”
+
+“To hear is to obey!” Ismail grumbled, reaching with his long arm
+through the window.
+
+The engine shrieked again, somebody whistled, and the train began to
+move.
+
+“You've missed it!” said Saunders, amused at Ismail's frantic
+disappointment. The giant was tugging at his beard. “How about your
+trunk? Better wire ahead and have it spotted for you.”
+
+        “No,” said King;  “it's still in the baggage room at the
+other station. I didn't intend to go by this train. Came down here
+to see another fellow off, that's all! Have a cigar and then let's go
+together and look those prisoners over!”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+
+
+   Men boast in the Hills, when they ought to pray;
+   For the wind blows lusty, and the blood runs red,
+   And Law lies belly upwards for a man to wreak his fancy on it.
+   Down in the plains, in the dust of the plains
+   Where law is master and a good man ought to boast,
+   They all lie belly downwards praying for their Hills again!
+
+
+The rear lights of the train he had not taken swayed out of Delhi
+station and King grinned as he wiped the sweat from his face with
+a dripping handkerchief. Behind him towered the hook-nosed Ismail,
+resentful of the unexpected. In front of him Saunders eyed the proffered
+black cheroots suspiciously, accepted one with an air of curiosity and
+passed the case back. Around them the clatter of the station crowd began
+to die, and Parsimony in a shabby uniform went round to lower lights.
+
+“Are you sure--”
+
+King's merry eyes looked into Saunders' as if there were no world war
+really and they two were puppets in a comedy.
+
+“--are you absolutely certain Yasmini is in Delhi?”
+
+“No,” said Saunders. “What I swear to is that she has not left by train.
+It's my business to know who leaves by train.”
+
+“What can you suggest?” asked King, twisting at his scrubby little
+mustache. But if he wished to convey the impression of a man at his
+wits' end, he failed signally.
+
+“I? Nothing! She's the most elusive individual in Asia! One person
+in the world knows where she is, unless she has an accomplice. My
+information's negative. I know she has not gone by--”
+
+King struck a match and held it out, so the sentence was unfinished;
+the first few puffs of the astonishing cigar wiped out all memory of the
+missing word. And then King changed the subject.
+
+“Those men I asked you to arrest--?”
+
+“Nabbed”--puff--“every one of 'em!”--puff--puff--“all
+under”--puff--puff--“lock and key,--best smoke I ever tasted--where
+d'you get 'em?”
+
+“Had they been in communication with her?”
+
+Puff--puff--“You bet they had! Where d'you get these things?”
+
+“Not her special men by any chance?”
+
+Puff--“Gad, what smoke!--couldn't say, of course,
+but”--puff--puff--“shouldn't think so.”
+
+“Well--I'll go along with you if you like, and look them over.”
+
+Both tone and manner gave Saunders credit for the suggestion, and
+Saunders seemed to like it. There is nothing like following up, in
+football, war or courtship.
+
+“I see you're a judge of a cigar,” said King, and Saunders purred,
+all men being fools to some extent, and the only trouble being to
+demonstrate the fact.
+
+They had started for the station entrance when a nasal voice began
+intoning, “Cap-teen King sahib--Cap-teen King sahib!” and a telegraph
+messenger passed them with his book under his arm. King whistled him. A
+moment later he was tearing open an official urgent telegram and writing
+a string of figures in pencil across the top. Then he decoded swiftly,
+
+        “Advices are Yasmini was in Delhi as recently as six
+        this evening.  Fail to understand your inability to
+        get in touch.  Have you tried at her house?  Matters
+        in Khyber district much less satisfactory.  Word from
+        O-C Khyber Rifles to effect that lashkar is collecting.
+        Better sweep up in Delhi and proceed northward as quickly
+        as compatible with caution.   L. M. L.”
+
+The three letters at the end were the general's coded signature. The
+wording of the telegram was such that as he read King saw a mental
+picture of the general's bald red skull and could almost hear him say
+the “fail to understand.” The three words “much less satisfactory” were
+a bookful of information. So, as he folded up the telegram, tore the
+penciled strip of figures from the top and burned it with a match, he
+was at pains to look pleased.
+
+“Good news?” asked Saunders, blowing smoke through his nose.
+
+“Excellent. Where's my man? Here--you--Ismail!”
+
+The giant came and towered above him.
+
+“You swore she went North!”
+
+“Ha, sahib! To Peshawur she went!”
+
+“Did she start from this station?”
+
+“From where else, sahib?”
+
+But this was too much for Saunders, who stepped forward and thrust in
+an oar. King on the other hand stepped back a pace so as to watch both
+faces.
+
+“Then, when did she go?”
+
+“I saw her go!” said Ismail, affronted.
+
+“When? When, confound you! When?”
+
+“Yesterday.”
+
+“I expect he means to-morrow,” said King. With the advantage of
+looker-on and a very deep experience of Northerners, he had noted that
+Ismail was lying and that Saunders was growing doubtful, although both
+men concealed the truth with what was very close to being art.
+
+“I have a telegram here,” he said, “that says she is in Delhi!”
+
+He patted his coat, where the inner pocket bulged.
+
+“Nay, then the tar lies, for I saw her go with these two eyes of mine!”
+
+“It is not wise to lie to me, my friend,” King assured him, so
+pleasantly that none could doubt he was telling truth.
+
+“If I lie may I eat dirt!” Ismail answered him.
+
+Inches lent the Afridi dignity, but dignity has often been used as a
+stalking horse for untruth. King nodded, and it was not possible to
+judge by his expression whether he believed or not.
+
+“Let's make a move,” he said, turning to Saunders. “She seems at
+any rate to wish it believed she has gone North. I can't stay here
+indefinitely. If she's here she's on the watch here, and there's no need
+of me. If she has gone North, then that is where the kites are wheeling!
+I'll take the early morning train. Where are the prisoners?”
+
+“In the old Mir Khan Palace. We were short of jail room and had to
+improvise. The horse-stalls there have come in handy more than once
+before. Shall we take this gharry?”
+
+With Ismail up beside the driver nursing King's bag and looking like
+a great grim vulture about to eat the horse, they drove back through
+swarming streets in the direction of the river. King seemed to have lost
+all interest in crowds. He scarcely even troubled to watch when they
+were held up at a cross-roads by a marching regiment that tramped as if
+it were herald of the Last Trump, with bayonets glistening in the street
+lights. He sat staring ahead in silence, although Saunders made more
+than one effort to engage him in conversation.
+
+“No!” he said at last suddenly--so that Saunders jumped.
+
+“No what?”
+
+“No need to stay here. I've got what I came for!”
+
+“What was that?” asked Saunders, but King was silent again. Conscious of
+the unaccustomed weight on his left wrist, he moved his arm so that the
+sleeve drew and he could see the edge of the great gold bracelet Rewa
+Gunga had given him in Yasmini's name.
+
+“Know anything of Rewa Gunga?” he asked suddenly again.
+
+“The Rangar?”
+
+“Yes, the Rangar. Yasmini's man.”
+
+“Not much. I've seen him. I've spoken with him, and I've had to stand
+impudence from him--twice. I've been tipped off more than once to let
+him alone because he's her man. He does ticklish errands for her, or so
+they say. He's what you might call 'known to the police' all right.”
+
+They began to approach an age-old palace near the river, and Saunders
+whispered a pass-word when an armed guard halted them. They were halted
+again at a gloomy gateway where an officer came out to look them over;
+by his leave they left the gharry and followed him under the arch
+until their heels rang on stone paving in a big ill-lighted courtyard
+surrounded by high walls.
+
+There, after a little talk, they left Ismail squatting beside King's
+bag, and Saunders led the way through a modern iron door, into what had
+once been a royal prince's stables.
+
+In gloom that was only thrown into contrast by a wide-spaced row of
+electric lights, a long line of barred and locked converted horse-stalls
+ran down one side of a lean-to building. The upper half of each locked
+door was a grating of steel rods, so that there was some ventilation for
+the prisoners; but very little light filtered between the bars, and all
+that King could see of the men within was the whites of their eyes. And
+they did not look friendly.
+
+He had to pass between them and the light, and they could see more of
+him than he could of them. At the first cell he raised his left hand and
+made the gold bracelet on his wrist clink against the steel bars.
+
+A moment later be cursed himself, and felt the bracelet with his
+fingernail. He had made a deep nick in the soft gold. A second later yet
+he smiled.
+
+“May God be with thee!” boomed a prisoner's voice in Pashtu.
+
+“Didn't know that fellow was handcuffed,” said Saunders. “Did you hear
+the ring? They should have been taken off. Leaving his irons on has made
+him polite, though.”
+
+He passed on, and King followed him, saying nothing. But at the next
+cell he repeated what he had done at the first, taking better care of
+the gold but letting his wrist stay longer in the light.
+
+“May God be with thee!” said a voice within.
+
+“Gettin' a shade less arrogant, what?” said Saunders.
+
+“May God be with thee!” said a man in the third stall as King passed.
+
+“They seem to be anxious for your morals!” laughed Saunders, keeping a
+pace or two ahead to do the honors of the place.
+
+“May God be with thee!” said a fourth man, and King desisted for the
+present, because Saunders looked as if he were growing inquisitive.
+
+“Where did you arrest them?” he asked when Saunders came to a stand
+under a light.
+
+“All in one place. At Ali's.”
+
+“Who and what is Ali?”
+
+“Pimp--crimp--procurer--Prussian spy and any other evil thing that takes
+his fancy! Runs a combination gambling hell and boarding house. Lets
+'em run into debt and blackmails 'em. Ali's in the kaiser's pay--that's
+known! 'Musing thing about it is he keeps a photo of Wilhelm in his
+pocket and tries to make himself believe the kaiser knows him by name.
+Suffers from swelled head, which is part of their plan, of course.
+We'll get him when we want him, but at present he's useful 'as is' for
+a decoy. Ali was very much upset at the arrest--asked in the name of
+Heaven--seems to be familiar with God, too, and all the angels!--how he
+shall collect all the money these men owe him!”
+
+“You wouldn't call these men prosperous, then?”
+
+“Not exactly! Ali is the only spy out of the North who prospers much at
+present, and even he gets most of his money out of his private business.
+Why, man, the real Germans we have pounced on are all as poor as church
+mice. That's another part of the plan, of course, which is sweet in all
+its workings. They're paid less than driven by threats of exposure to
+us--comes cheaper, and serves to ginger up the spies! The Germans pay
+Ali a little, and he traps the Hillmen when they come South--lets
+'em gamble--gets 'em into debt--plays on their fear of jail and their
+ignorance of the Indian Penal Code, which altereth every afternoon--and
+spends a lot of time telling 'em stories to take back with 'em to the
+Hills when they can get away. They can get away when they've paid him
+what they owe. He makes that clear, and of course that's the fly in the
+amber. Yasmini sends and pays their board and gambling debts, and she's
+our man, so to speak. When they get back to the 'Hills'--”
+
+“Thanks,” said King, “I know what happens in the 'Hills. Tell me about
+the Delhi end of it.”
+
+“Well, when the wander-fever grabs 'em again they come down once more
+from their 'Hills' to drink and gamble,--and first they go to Yasmini's.
+But she won't let 'em drink at her place. Have to give her credit for
+that, y'know; her place has never been a stews. Sooner or later they
+grow tired of virtue, 'specially with so much intrigue goin' on under
+their noses, and back they all drift to Ali's and tell him tales to
+tell the Germans--and the round begins again. Yasmini coaxes all their
+stories out of 'em and primes 'em with a few extra good ones into the
+bargain. Everybody's fooled--'specially the Germans--and exceptin', of
+course, Yasmini and the Raj. Nobody ever fooled that woman, nor ever
+will if my belief goes for anything!”
+
+“Sounds simple!” said King.
+
+“Simple and sordid!” agreed Saunders.
+
+King looked up and down the line of locked doors and then straight into
+Saunders' eyes in a friendly, yet rather disconcerting way. One could
+not judge whether he were laughing or just thinking.
+
+“D'you suppose it's as simple as all that?”
+
+“How d'you mean?”
+
+“D'you suppose the Germans aren't in direct touch with the tribes?”
+
+“Why should they be? The simpler the better, I expect, from their point
+of view; and the cheaper the better, too!”
+
+“Um-m-m!” King rubbed his chin. “On what charge did you get these men?”
+
+“Defense of the Realm--suspicious characters--charge to be entered
+later.”
+
+“Good! That's simple at all events! Know anything of my man Ismail?”
+
+“Sure! He's one of Yasmini's pets. She bailed him out of Ali's three
+years ago and he worships her. It was he who broke the leg and ribs of
+a pup-rajah a month or two ago for putting on too much dog in her
+reception room! He's Ursus out of Quo Vadis! He's dog, desperado,
+stalking horse and Keeper of the Queen's secrets!”
+
+“Then why d'you suppose she passed him along to me?” asked King.
+
+“Dunno! This is your little mystery, not mine!”
+
+“Glad you appreciate that! Do me a favor, will you?”
+
+“Anything in reason.”
+
+“Get the keys to all these cells--send 'em in here to me by Ismail--and
+leave me in here alone!”
+
+Saunders whistled and wiped sweat from his glistening face, for in spite
+of windows open to the courtyard it was hotter than a furnace room.
+
+“Mayn't I have you thrown into a den of tigers?” he asked. “Or a nest
+of cobras? Or get the fiery furnace ready? You'll find 'em sore--and
+dangerous! That man at the end with handcuffs on has probably been
+violent! That 'God be with thee' stuff is habit--they say it with
+unction before they knife a man!”
+
+“I'll be careful, then,” King chuckled; and it is a fact that few men
+can argue with him when he laughs quietly in that way. “Send me in the
+keys, like a good chap.”
+
+So Saunders went, glad enough to get into the outer air. He slammed
+the great iron door behind him as if he were glad, too, to disassociate
+himself from King and all foolishness. Like many another first-class
+man, King sheds friends as a cat sheds fur going under a gate. They grow
+again and quit again and don't seem to make much difference.
+
+The instant the door slammed King continued down the line with his left
+wrist held high so that the occupant of each cell in turn could see the
+bracelet.
+
+“May God be with thee!” came the instant greeting from each cell until
+down toward the farther end. The occupants of the last six cells were
+silent.
+
+Numbers had been chalked roughly on the doors. With wetted fingers he
+rubbed out the chalk marks on the last six doors, and he had scarcely
+finished doing that when Ismail strode in, slamming the great iron door
+behind him, jangling a bunch of keys and looking more than ever like
+somebody out of the Old Testament.
+
+“Open every door except those whose numbers I have rubbed out!” King
+ordered him.
+
+Ismail proceeded to obey as if that were the least improbable order
+in all the world. It took him two minutes to select the pass-key and
+determine how it worked, then the doors flew open one after another in
+quick succession.
+
+“Come out!” he growled. “Come out!--Come out!” although King had not
+ordered that.
+
+King went and stood under the center light with his left arm bared. The
+prisoners, emerging like dead men out of tombs, blinked at the bright
+light--saw him--then the bracelet--and saluted.
+
+“May God be with thee!” growled each of them.
+
+They stood still then, awaiting fresh developments. It did not seem
+to occur to any one of them as strange that a British officer in khaki
+uniform should be sporting Yasmini's talisman; the thing was apparently
+sufficient explanation in itself.
+
+“Ye all know this?” he asked, holding up his wrist. “Whose is this?”
+
+“Hers!”
+
+The answer was monosyllabic and instant from all thirty throats. “May
+Allah guard her, sleeping and awake!” added one or two of them.
+
+King lit a cheroot and made mental note of the wisdom of referring to
+her by pronoun, not by name.
+
+“And I? Who am I?” he asked, since it saves worlds of trouble to have
+the other side state the case. The Secret Service was not designed for
+giving information, but discovering it.
+
+“Her messenger! Who else? Thou art he who shall take us to the 'Hills'!
+She promised!”
+
+“How did she know ye were in this jail?” he asked them, and one of the
+Hillmen laughed like a jackal, showing yellow eye-teeth. The others
+cackled in chorus after him.
+
+“Answer that riddle thyself--or else ask her! Who are we? Bats, that can
+see in the night? Spirits, who can hear through walls? Nay, we be plain
+men of the mountains!”
+
+“But where were ye when she promised?”
+
+“At Ali's. All of us at Ali's--held for debt. We sent and begged of her.
+She sent word back by a woman that one of the sirkar's men shall free us
+and send us home. So we waited, eating shame and little else, at Ali's.
+At last came a sahib in a great rage, who ordered irons put on our
+wrists and us marched hither. Only when each was pushed into a separate
+cell were the irons taken off again. Yet we were patient, for we knew
+this is part of her cunning, to get us away from Ali without paying him.
+'May Ali die of want,' said we, with one voice all together in these
+cells! And now we be ready! They fed us before we had been in here an
+hour. Our bellies be full, but we be hungry for the 'Hills'!”
+
+King thought of the gold-hilted knife, that still rested under his
+shirt. He was tempted to show it to them and find out surely whose
+it was and what it meant. But wisdom and curiosity seldom mingle. He
+thought of Ismail--“Ursus, of Quo Vadis--dog, desperado, stalking-horse
+and Keeper of the Queen's secrets.” It was not time yet to run risks
+with Ismail. The knife stayed where it was.
+
+“I shall start for the Hills at dawn,” he said slowly, and he watched
+their eyes gleam at the news. No caged tiger is as wretched as a
+prisoned Hillman. No freed bird wings more wildly for the open. No moth
+comes more foolishly back to the flame again. It was easy to take pity
+on them--probably not one of whom knew pity's meaning.
+
+“Is there any among you who would care to come--?”
+
+“Ah-h-h-h!”
+
+“--at the price of strict obedience?”
+
+“Eh-h-h-h-h!”
+
+It seemed there was no word in Pashtu that could express their
+willingness.
+
+“We be very, very weary for our Hills!” explained the nearest man.
+
+“Aye!” King answered. “And ye all owe Ali!”
+
+“Uh-h-h-h-h!”
+
+But he knew better than to browbeat them on that account just then, for
+the men of the North are easier led than driven--up to a certain point.
+Yet it is no bad plan to remind them of the fundamentals to begin with.
+
+“Will ye obey me, and him?” he asked, laying his hand on Ismail's
+shoulder, as much to let them see the bracelet again as for any other
+reason.
+
+“Aye! If we fail, Allah do more to us!”
+
+King laughed. “Ye shall leave this place as my prisoners. Here ye have
+no friends. Here ye must obey. But what when ye come to your 'Hills' at
+last? Can one man hold thirty men prisoners then? In the 'Hills' will ye
+still obey me?”
+
+They answered him in chorus. Every man of the thirty, and Ismail into
+the bargain, threw his right hand in the air.
+
+“Allah witness that we will obey!”
+
+“Ah-h-h!” said King. “I have heard Hillmen swear by Allah many a time!
+Many a time!”
+
+The answer to that was unexpected. Ismail knelt--seized his hand--and
+pressed the gold bracelet to his lips!
+
+In turn, every one of them filed by, knelt reverently and kissed the
+bracelet!
+
+“Saw ye ever a Hillman do that before?” asked Ismail. “They will obey
+thee! Have no fear!”
+
+“Kutch dar nahin hai!” King answered. “There is no such thing as fear!”
+ and Ismail grinned at him, not knowing that King was feeling as Aladdin
+must have done.
+
+“I have heard you swear,” said King; “be ye true men!”
+
+“Ah-h-h!”
+
+“Have they belongings that ought to be collected first?” he asked, and
+Ismail laughed.
+
+“No more than the dead have! A shroud apiece! Ali gave them bitterness
+to eat and picked their teeth afterward for gleanings! They stand in
+what they own!”
+
+“Then, come!” ordered King, turning his back confidently on thirty
+savages whom Saunders, for instance, would have preferred to drive in
+front of him, after first seeing them handcuffed. But when he is not
+pressed for time neither pistols, nor yet handcuffs, are included in
+King's method.
+
+“Each lock has a key, but some keys fit all locks,” says the Eastern
+proverb. King has been chosen for many ticklish errands in his time, and
+Saunders is still in Delhi.
+
+Through the great iron door into dim outer darkness King led them and
+presently made them squat in a close-huddled semicircle on the paving
+stones, like night-birds waiting for a meal.
+
+“I want blankets for them--two good ones apiece--and food for a week's
+journey!” he told the astonished Saunders; and he spoke so decidedly
+that the other man's questions and argument died stillborn. “While you
+attend to that for me, I'll be seeing his dibs and making explanations.
+You look full of news. What do you know?”
+
+“I've telephoned all the other stations, and my men swear Yasmini has
+not left Delhi by train!”
+
+King smiled at him.
+
+“If I leave by train d'you suppose she'll hear of it?”
+
+“You bet! Bet your boots! Man alive--if she's interested in you by so
+much,”--he measured off a fraction of his little finger end--“she knows
+your next two moves ahead, to say nothing of your past half-dozen!
+I crossed her bows once and thought I had her at a disadvantage. She
+laughed at me. On my honor, my spine tingles yet at the mere thought of
+it! You've never met her? Never heard her laugh? Never seen her eyes?
+You've a treat in store for you--and a mauvais quat' d'heure! What'll
+you bet me she doesn't laugh you out of countenance the very first time
+you meet? Come now--what'll you bet?”
+
+“Not in the habit,” King answered, glancing at his watch. “Will you see
+about their rations, please, and the blankets? Thanks!”
+
+They went then in opposite directions and the prisoners were left
+squatting under the eyes and bayonets of a very suspicious prison guard,
+who made no secret of being ready for all conceivable emergencies. One
+enthusiast drew the cartridge out of his breech-chamber and licked it at
+intervals of a minute or two, to the very great interest of the Hillmen,
+who memorized every detail that by any stretch of imagination might be
+expected to improve their own shooting when they should get home again.
+
+King found his way on foot through a maze of streets to a palace where
+he was admitted through one door after another by sentries who saluted
+when he had whispered to them. He ended by sitting on the end of the bed
+of a gray-headed man who owns three titles and whose word is law between
+the borders of a province. To him he talked as one schoolboy to a bigger
+one, because the gray-haired man had understanding, and hence sympathy.
+
+“I don't envy you!” said he under the sheet. “There was an American
+here not long ago--most amusing man I ever talked to. He had the right
+expression. 'I do not desiderate that pie!' was his way of putting it.
+Good, don't you think?”
+
+All the while he talked the older man was writing on a pad that he held
+propped by his knees beneath the bedclothes, holding the paper tight to
+keep it from fluttering in the breeze of a big electric fan.
+
+“There's the release for your prisoners. Take it--and take them!
+Whatever possessed you to want such a gift?”
+
+“Orders, sir.”
+
+“Whose?”
+
+“His. He sent for me to Peshawur and gave me strict orders to work with,
+not against her. This was obvious.”
+
+“How obvious? It seems bewildering!”
+
+“Well, sir,--first place, she doesn't want to seem to be connected with
+me. Otherwise she'd have been more in evidence. Second place, she has
+left Delhi--his telegram and Saunders' men on oath notwithstanding--and
+she did not mean to leave those men. I imagine her best way to manage
+Hillmen is to keep promises, and they say she promised them. Third
+place, if those thirty men had been anything but her particular pet
+gang they'd either have been over the border or else in jail before
+now,--just like all the others. For some reason that I don't pretend to
+understand, she promised 'em more than she has been able to perform. So
+I provide performance. She gets the credit for it. I get a pretty good
+personal following at least as far as up the Khyber! Q.E.D., sir!”
+
+The man in bed nodded. “Not bad,” he said.
+
+“Didn't she make some effort to get those men away from Ali's?” King
+asked him. “I mean, didn't she try to get them dry-nursed by the sirkar
+in some way?”
+
+“Yes. She did. But it was difficult. In the first place, there didn't
+seem to be any particular hurry. They were eating Ali's substance. The
+scoundrel had to feed them as long as he kept them there, and we wanted
+that. We forbade her to pay their debts to Ali, because he has too
+urgent need of money just now. He is being pressed on account of debts
+of his own, and the pressure is making him take risks. He has been
+begging for money from the German agents. We know who they are, and we
+expect to make a big haul within a few hours now.”
+
+“Hope I didn't spoil things by butting in, sir.”
+
+“No. This is different. She wanted them arrested and locked up at a
+moment when the jails were all crowded. And then she wanted us to put
+'em into trucks and railroad 'em up North out of harm's way as she put
+it, and we happened to be too busy. The railway staff was overworked.
+Now things are getting straightened out. I felt it keenly not being able
+to oblige her, but she asked too much at the wrong moment! I would have
+done it if I could out of gratitude; it was she who tipped off for us
+most of the really dangerous men, and it was not her fault a few of them
+escaped. But we've all been working both tides under, King. Take me;
+this is my first night in bed in three, and here I am awake! No--nothing
+personal--glad to see you, but please understand. And I'm a leisured
+dilettante compared to most of the others. She must have known our fix.
+She shouldn't have asked.”
+
+King smiled. “Perfectly good opportunity for me, sir!” he said
+cheerfully.
+
+“So you seem to think. But look out for that woman, King--she's
+dangerous. She's got the brains of Asia coupled with Western energy! I
+think she's on our side, and I know he believes it; but watch her!”
+
+“Ham dekta hai!” King grinned. But the older man continued to look as if
+he pitied him.
+
+“If you get through alive, come and tell me about it afterward. Now,
+mind you do! I'm awfully interested, but as for envying you--”
+
+“Envy!” King almost squealed. He made the bed-springs rattle as he
+jumped. “I wouldn't swap jobs with General French, sir!”
+
+“Nor with me, I suppose!”
+
+“Nor with you, sir.
+
+“Good-by, then. Good-by, King, my boy. Good-by, Athelstan. Your
+brother's up the Khyber, isn't he? Give him my regards. Good-by!”
+
+Long before dawn the thirty prisoners and Ismail squatted in a little
+herd on the up-platform of a railway station, shepherded by King, who
+smoked a cheroot some twenty paces away, sitting on an unmarked chest of
+medicines. He seemed absorbed in a book on surgery that he had borrowed
+from a chance-met acquaintance in the go-down where he drew the medical
+supplies. Ismail sat on the one trunk that had been fetched from
+the other station and nursed the new hand-bag on his knees, picking
+everlastingly at the lock and wondering audibly what the bag contained
+to an accompaniment of low-growled sympathy.
+
+“I am his servant--for she said so--and he said so. As the custom is he
+gave me the key of the great bag--on which I sit--as he said himself,
+for safe-keeping. Then why--why in Allah's name--am I not to have the
+key of this bag too? Of this little bag that holds so little and is so
+light?”
+
+“It might be money in it?” hazarded one of the herd.
+
+“Nay, for that it is too light.”
+
+“Paper money!” suggested another man. “Hundies, with printing on the
+face that sahibs accept instead of gold.”
+
+“Nay, I know where his money is,” said Ismail. “He has but little with
+him.”
+
+“A razor would slit the leather easily,” suggested another man. “Then
+with a hand inserted carefully through the slit, so as not to widen it
+more than needful, a man could soon discover the contents. And later,
+the bag might be dropped or pushed violently against some sharp thing,
+to explain the cut.”
+
+Ismail shook his head.
+
+“Why? What could he do to thee?”
+
+“It is because I know not what he would do to me that I will do
+nothing!” answered Ismail. “He is not at all like other sahibs I have
+had dealings with. This man does unexpected things. This man is not mad,
+he has a devil. I have it in my heart to love this man. But such talk is
+foolishness. We are all her men!”
+
+“Aye! We are her men!” came the chorus, so that King looked up and
+watched them over the open book.
+
+At dawn, when the train pulled out, the thirty prisoners sat safely
+locked in third-class compartments. King lay lazily on the cushions of a
+first-class carriage in the rear, utterly absorbed in the principles of
+antiseptic dressing, as if that had anything to do with Prussians and
+the Khyber Pass; and Ismail attended to the careful packing of soda
+water bottles in the ice-box on the floor.
+
+“Shall I open the little bag, sahib?” he asked.
+
+King shook his head.
+
+Ismail shook the bag.
+
+“The sound is as of things of much importance all disordered,” he said
+sagely. “It might be well to rearrange.”
+
+“Put it over there!” King ordered. “Set it down!”
+
+Ismail obeyed and King laid his book down to light another of his black
+cheroots. The theme of antiseptics ceased to exercise its charm over
+him. He peeled off his tunic, changed his shirt and lay back in sweet
+contentment. Headed for the “Hills,” who would not be contented, who had
+been born in their very shadow?--in their shadow, of a line of Britons
+who have all been buried there!
+
+“The day after to-morrow I'll see snow!” he promised himself. And
+Ismail, grinning with yellow teeth through a gap in his wayward beard,
+understood and sympathized.
+
+Forward in the third-class carriages the prisoners hugged themselves and
+crooned as they met old landmarks and recognized the changing scenery.
+There was a new cleaner tang in the hot wind that spoke of the “Hills”
+ and home!
+
+Delhi had drawn them as Monte Carlo attracts the gamblers of all Europe.
+But Delhi had spewed them out again, and oh! how exquisite the promise
+of the “Hills” was, and the thunder of the train that hurried--the
+bumping wheels that sang Himahlayas--Himahlyas!--the air that blew in on
+them unscented--the reawakened memory--the heart's desire for the cold
+and the snow and the cruelty--the dark nights and the shrieking storms
+and the savagery of the Land of the Knife ahead!
+
+The journey to Peshawur, that ought to have been wearisome because
+they were everlastingly shunted into sidings to make way for roaring
+south-bound troop trains and kept waiting at every wayside station
+because the trains ahead of them were blocked three deep, was no less
+than a jubilee progress!
+
+Not a packed-in regiment went by that was not howled at by King's
+prisoners as if they were blood-brothers of every man in it. Many an
+officer whom King knew waved to him from a passing train.
+
+“Meet you in Berlin!” was a favorite greeting. And after that they would
+shout to him for news and be gone before King could answer.
+
+Many a man, at stations where the sidings were all full and nothing
+less than miracles seemed able to release the wedged-in trains, came
+and paced up and down a platform side by side with King. From them he
+received opinions, but no sympathy to speak of.
+
+“Got to stay in India? Hard lines!” Then the conversation would be
+bluntly changed, for in the height of one's enthusiasm it is not decent
+to hurt another fellow's feelings. Simple, simple as a little child is
+the clean-clipped British officer. “Look at that babu, now. Don't you
+think he's a marvel? Don't you think the Indian babu's a marvel? Sixty
+a month is more than the beggar gets, and there he goes, doing two
+jobs and straightening out tangled trains into the bargain! Isn't he a
+wonder, King?”
+
+“India's a wonderful country,” King would answer, that being one of his
+stock remarks. And to his credit be it written that he never laughed at
+one of them. He let them think they were more fortunate than he, with
+manlier, bloodier work to do.
+
+Peshawur, when they reached it at last, looked dusty and bleak in the
+comfortless light of Northern dawn. But the prisoners crowed and crooned
+it a greeting, and there was not much grumbling when King refused to
+unlock their compartment doors. Having waited thus long, they could
+endure a few more hours in patience, now that they could see and smell
+their “Hills” at last.
+
+And there was the general again, not in a dog-cart this time, but
+furiously driven in a motor-car, roaring and clattering into the station
+less than two minutes after the train arrived. He was out of the car,
+for all his age and weight, before it had come to a stand. He took one
+steady look at King and then at the prisoners before he returned King's
+salute.
+
+“Good!” he said. And then, as if that were not enough: “Excellent! Don't
+let 'em out, though, to chew the rag with people on the platform. Keep
+'em in!”
+
+“They're locked in, sir.”
+
+“Excellent! Come and walk up and down with me.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+
+
+     Death roosts in the Khyber while he preens his wings!
+     --Native Proverb
+
+
+“Seen her?” asked the general, with his hands behind him.
+
+“No,” said King, looking sharply sidewise at him and walking stride for
+stride. His hands were behind him, too, and one of them covered the gold
+bracelet on his other wrist.
+
+The general looked equally sharply sidewise.
+
+“Nor've I,” he said. “She called me up over the phone yesterday to ask
+for facilities for her man Rewa Gunga, and he was in here later. He's
+waiting for you at the foot of the Pass--camped near the fort at Jamrud
+with your bandobast all ready. She's on ahead--wouldn't wait.”
+
+King listened in silence, and his prisoners, watching him through the
+barred compartment windows, formed new and golden opinions of him, for
+it is common knowledge in the “Hills” that when a burra sahib speaks
+to a chota sahib, the chota sahib ought to say, “Yes, sir, oh, yes!” at
+very short intervals. Therefore King could not be a chota sahib after
+all. So much the better. The “Hills” ever loved to deal with men in
+authority, just as they ever despised underlings.
+
+“What made you go back for the prisoners?” the general asked. “Who gave
+you that cue?”
+
+“It's a safe rule never to do what the other man expects, sir, and Rewa
+Gunga expected me to travel by his train.”
+
+“Was that your only reason?”
+
+“No, sir. I had general reasons. None of 'em specific. Where natives
+have a finger in the pie there's always something left undone at the
+last minute.”
+
+“But what made you investigate those prisoners?”
+
+“Couldn't imagine why thirty men should be singled out for special
+treatment. Rewa Gunga told me they were still at large in Delhi.
+Couldn't guess why. Had 'em arrested so's to be able to question 'em.
+That's all, sir.”
+
+“Not nearly all!” said the general. “You realize by now, I suppose, that
+they're her special men--special personal following?”
+
+“Guessed something of that sort.”
+
+“Well--she's clever. It occurred to her that the safest way to get
+'em up North was to have 'em arrested and deported. That would avoid
+interference and delay and would give her a chance to act deliverer at
+this end, and so make 'em grateful to her--you see? Rewa Gunga told me
+all this, you understand. He seems to think she's semi-divine. He was
+full of her cleverness in having thought of letting 'em all get into
+debt at a house of ill repute, so as to have 'em at hand when she wanted
+'em.”
+
+“She must have learned that trick from our merchant marine,” said King.
+
+“Maybe. She's clever. She asked me over the phone whether her thirty men
+had started North. I sent a telegram in cypher to find out. The answer
+was that you had found 'em and rounded 'em up and were bringing 'em with
+you. When she called me up on the phone the second time I told her so,
+and I heard her chuckle with delight. So I emphasized the point of your
+having discovered 'em and saved 'em every wit whole and all that kind of
+thing. I asked her to come and see me, but she wouldn't,--said she was
+disguised and particularly did not want to be recognized, which
+was reasonable enough. She sent Rewa Gunga instead. Now, this seems
+important:
+
+“Before I sent you down to Delhi--before I sent for you at all--I told
+her what I meant to do, and I never in my life knew a woman raise such
+terrific objections to working with a man. As it happened her objections
+only confirmed my determination to send for you, and before she went
+down to Delhi to clean up I told her flatly she would either have to
+work with you or else stay in India for the duration of the war.”
+
+The general did not notice that King was licking his lips. Nor, if
+he had noticed King's hand that now was in front of him pressing on
+something under his shirt, could he have guessed that the something
+was a gold-hilted knife with a bronze blade. King grunted in token of
+attention, and the general continued.
+
+“She gave in finally, but I felt nervous about it. Now, without your
+getting sight of her--you say you haven't seen her?--her whole attitude
+has changed! What have you done? Bringing up her thirty men seems a
+little enough thing. Yet, she swears by you! Used to swear at you, and
+now says you're the only officer in the British army with enough brains
+to fill a helmet! Says she wouldn't go up the Khyber without you! Says
+you're indispensable! Sent Rewa Gunga round to me with orders to
+make sure I don't change my mind about you! What have you done to
+her--bewitched her?”
+
+“Done nothing,” said King.
+
+“Well, keep on doing nothing in the same style and the world shall
+render you its best jobs, one after the other, in sequence! You've made
+a good beginning!”
+
+“Know anything of Rewa Gunga, sir?”
+
+“Nothing, except that he's her man. She trusts him, so we've got to, and
+you've got to take him up the Khyber with you. What she orders, he'll
+do, or you may take it from me she would never have left him behind.
+As long as she is on our side you will be pretty safe in trusting Rewa
+Gunga. And she has got to be on our side. Got to be! She's the only key
+we've got to Khinjan, and hell is brewing there this minute! She dare
+unlock the gates and ride the devil down the Khyber if she thought it
+worth her while! You're to go up the Khyber after her to convince her
+that there are better mounts than the devil and better fun than playing
+with hell-fire! The Rangar told me he had given you her passport--that
+right?”
+
+As they turned at the end of the platform King bared his wrist and
+showed the gold bracelet.
+
+“Good!” said the general, but King thought his face clouded. “That thing
+is worth more than a hundred men. Jack Allison wore that same bracelet,
+unless I'm much mistaken, on his way down in disguise from Bukhara. So
+did another man we both knew; but he died. Be sure not to forget to give
+it back to her when the show's over, King.”
+
+King nodded and grunted. “What's the news from Khinjan, sir?”
+
+“Nothing specific, except that the place is filling up. You remember
+what I told you about the 'Heart of the Hills' being in Khinjan? Well,
+they say now that the 'Heart of the Hills' has been awake for a long
+time, and that when the heart stirs the body does not lie quiet long. No
+use trying to guess what they mean; go and find out. And remember--the
+whole armed force at my disposal in this Province isn't more than enough
+to tempt the tribes to conclusions! It's a case for diplomacy. It's a
+case where diplomacy must not fail.”
+
+King said nothing, but the chin-strap mark on his cheek and chin grew
+slightly whiter, as it always does under the stress of emotion. He
+can not control it, and he has dyed it more than once on the eve of
+happenings, there being no more wisdom in wearing feelings on one's face
+than on a sleeve.
+
+“Here comes your engine,” said the general. “Well--there are two
+battalions of Khyber Rifles up the Pass and they're about at full
+strength. They've got word already that you are gazetted to them.
+They'll expect you. By the way, you've a brother in the K.R., haven't
+you?”
+
+“At Ali Masjid, sir.”
+
+“Give him my regards when you see him, will you?”
+
+“Thank you, sir.”
+
+“There's your engine whistling. You'd better hurry, Good-by, my boy. Get
+word to me whenever possible. Good luck to you! Regards to your brother!
+Good-by!”
+
+King saluted and stood watching while the general hurried to the waiting
+motor-car. When the car whirled away in a din of dust he returned
+leisurely to the train that had been shortened to three coaches. Then he
+gave the signal to start up the spur-track, that leads to Jamrud, where
+a fort cowers in the very throat of the dreadfulest gorge in Asia--the
+Khyber Pass.
+
+It was not a long journey, nor a very slow one, for there was nothing to
+block the way except occasional men with flags, who guarded culverts
+and little bridges. The Germans would know better than to waste time or
+effort on blowing up that track, but there might be Northern gentlemen
+at large, out to do damage for the sport of it, and the sepoys all along
+the line were posted in twos, and awake.
+
+It was low-tide under the Himalayas. The flood that was draining India
+of her armed men had left Jamrud high and dry with a little nondescript
+force stranded there, as it were, under a British major and some native
+officers. There were no more pomp and circumstance; no more of the
+reassuring thunder of gathering regiments, nor for that matter any more
+of that unarmed native helplessness that so stiffens the backs of the
+official English.
+
+Frowning over Jamrud were the lean “Hills,” peopled by the fiercest
+fighting men on earth, and the clouds that hung over the Khyber's course
+were an accent to the savagery.
+
+But King smiled merrily as he jumped out of the train, and Rewa Gunga,
+who was there to meet him, advanced with outstretched hand and a smile
+that would have melted snow on the distant peaks if he had only looked
+the other way.
+
+“Welcome, King sahib!” he laughed, with the air of a skilled fencer who
+admires another, better one. “I shall know better another time and let
+you keep in front of me! No more getting first into a train and settling
+down for the night! It may not be easy to follow you, and I suspect it
+isn't, but at least it jolly well can't be such a job as leading you! I
+trust you had a comfortable journey?”
+
+“Thanks,” said King, shaking hands with him, and then turning away to
+unlock the carriage doors that held his prisoners in. They were baying
+now like wolves to be free, and they surged out, like wolves from a
+cage, to clamor round the Rangar, pawing him and struggling to be first
+to ask him questions.
+
+“Nay, ye mountain people; nay!” he laughed. “I, too, am from the plains!
+What do I know of your families or of your feuds? Am I to be torn to
+pieces to make a meal?”
+
+At that Ismail interfered, with the aid of an ash pick-handle,
+chance-found beside the track.
+
+“Hill-bastards!” he howled at them, beating at them as if they were
+sheaves and his cudgel were a flail. “Sons of nameless mothers!
+Forgotten of God! Shameless! Brood of the evil one! Hands off!”
+
+King had to stop him, not that he feared trouble, for they did not seem
+to resent either abuse or cudgeling in the least--and that in itself was
+food for thought; but broken shoulders are no use for carrying loads.
+
+Laughing as if the whole thing was the greatest joke imaginable, Rewa
+Gunga fell into stride beside King and led him away in the direction of
+some tents.
+
+“She is up the Pass ahead of us,” he announced. “She was in the deuce of
+a hurry, I can assure you. She wanted to wait and meet you, but matters
+were too jolly well urgent, and we shall have our bally work cut out to
+catch her, you can bet! But I have everything ready--tents and beds and
+stores--everything!”
+
+King looked over his shoulder to make sure that Ismail was bringing the
+little leather bag along.
+
+“So have I,” he said quietly.
+
+“I have horses,” said Rewa Gunga, “and mules and--”
+
+“How did she travel up the Khyber?” King asked him, and the Rangar
+spared him a curious sidewise glance.
+
+“On a horse. You should have seen the horse!”
+
+“What escort had she?”
+
+“She?”
+
+Rewa Gunga chuckled and then suddenly grew serious.
+
+“The 'Hills' are her escort, King sahib. She is mistress in the 'Hills.'
+There isn't a murdering ruffian who would not lie down and let her walk
+on him! She rode away alone on a thoroughbred mare and she jolly well
+left me the mare's double on which to follow her. Come and look.”
+
+Not far from where the tents had been pitched in a cluster a string of
+horses winnied at a picket rope. King saw the two good horses ready for
+himself, and ten mules beside them that would have done credit to any
+outfit. But at the end of the line, pawing at the trampled grass, was a
+black mare that made his eyes open wide. Once in a hundred years or so
+a viceroy's cup, or a Derby is won by an animal that can stand and look
+and move as that mare did.
+
+“Just watch!” the Rangar boasted; hooking up the bit and throwing off
+the blanket. And as he mounted into the native-made rough-hide saddle
+a shout went up from the fort and native officers and half the soldiery
+came out to watch the poetry of motion.
+
+The mare was not the only one worth watching; her rider shared the
+praise. There was something unexpected, although not in the least
+ungainly, about the Rangar's seat in the saddle that was not the
+ordinary, graceful native balance and yet was full of grace. King
+ascribed the difference to the fact that the Rangar had seen no military
+service, and before the inadequacy of that explanation had asserted
+itself he had already forgotten to criticize in sheer admiration.
+
+There was none of the spurring and back-reining that some native bloods
+of India mistake for horse-manship. The Rangar rode with sympathy and
+most consummate skill, and the result was that the mare behaved as if
+she were part of him, responding to his thoughts, putting a foot where
+he wished her to put it and showing her wildest turn of speed along a
+level stretch in instant response to his mood.
+
+“Never saw anything better,” King admitted ungrudgingly, as the mare
+came back at a walk to her picket rope.
+
+“There is only one mare like this one,” laughed the Rangar. “She has
+her.”
+
+“What'll you take for this one?” King asked him. “Name your price!”
+
+“The mare is hers. You must ask her. Who knows? She is generous. There
+is nobody on earth more generous than she when she cares to be. See what
+you wear on your wrist!”
+
+“That is a loan,” said King, uncovering the bracelet. “I shall give it
+back to her when we meet.”
+
+“See what she says when you meet!” laughed the Rangar, taking a
+cigarette from his jeweled case with an air and smiling as he lighted
+it. “There is your tent, sahib.”
+
+He motioned with the cigarette toward a tent pitched quite a hundred
+yards away from the others and from the Rangar's own; with the Rangar's
+and the cluster of tents for the men it made an equilateral triangle, so
+that both he and the Rangar had privacy.
+
+With a nod of dismissal, King walked over to inspect the bandobast, and
+finding it much more extravagant than he would have dreamed of providing
+for himself, he lit one of his black cheroots, and with hands clasped
+behind him strolled over to the fort to interview Courtenay, the officer
+commanding.
+
+It so happened that Courtenay had gone up the Pass that morning with
+his shotgun after quail. He came back into view, followed by his little
+ten-man escort just as King neared the fort, and King timed his approach
+so as to meet him. The men of the escort were heavily burdened; he could
+see that from a distance.
+
+“Hello!” he said by the fort gate, cheerily, after he had saluted and
+the salute had been returned.
+
+“Oh, hello, King! Glad to see you. Heard you were coming, of course.
+Anything I can do?”
+
+“Tell me anything you know,” said King, offering him a cheroot which the
+other accepted. As he bit off the end they stood facing each other, so
+that King could see the oncoming escort and what it carried. Courtenay
+read his eyes.
+
+“Two of my men!” he said. “Found 'em up the Pass. Gazi work I think.
+They were cut all to pieces. There's a big lashkar gathering somewhere
+in the 'Hills,' and it might have been done by their skirmishers, but I
+don't think so.”
+
+“A lashkar besides the crowd at Khinjan?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Who's supposed to be leading it?”
+
+“Can't find out,” said Courtenay. Then he stepped aside to give orders
+to the escort. They carried the dead bodies into the fort.
+
+“Know anything of Yasmini?” King asked, when the major stood in front of
+him again.
+
+“By reputation, of course, yes. Famous person--sings like a
+bulbul--dances like the devil--lived in Delhi--mean her?”
+
+King nodded. “When did she start up the Pass?” he asked.
+
+“How d'ye mean?” Courtenay demanded sharply.
+
+“To-day or yesterday?”
+
+“She didn't start! I know who goes up and who comes down. Would you care
+to glance over the list?”
+
+“Know anything of Rewa Gunga?” King asked him.
+
+“Not much. Tried to buy his mare. Seen the animal? Gad! I'd give a
+year's pay for that beast! He wouldn't sell and I don't blame him.”
+
+“He goes up the Khyber with me,” said King. “He's what the Turks would
+call my youldash.”
+
+“And the Persians a hamrah, eh? There was an American here lately--merry
+fellow--and I was learning his language. Side partner's the word in
+the States. I can imagine a worse side partner than that same man Rewa
+Gunga--much worse.”
+
+“He told me just now,” said King, “that Yasmini went up the Pass
+unescorted, mounted on a mare the very dead spit of the black one you
+say you wanted to buy.”
+
+Courtenay whistled.
+
+“I'm sorry, King. I'm sorry to say he lied.”
+
+“Will you come and listen while I have it out with him?”
+
+“Certainly.”
+
+King threw away his less-than-half-consumed cheroot and they started to
+walk together toward King's camp. After a few minutes they arrived at a
+point from which they could see the prisoners lined up in a row facing
+Rewa Gunga. A less experienced eye than King's or Courtenay's could have
+recognized their attitude of reverent obedience.
+
+“He'll make a good adjutant for you, that man,” said Courtenay; but King
+only grunted.
+
+At sight of them Ismail left the line and came hurrying toward them with
+long mountainman's strides.
+
+“Tell Rewa Gunga sahib that I wish to speak to him!” King called, and
+Ismail hurried back again.
+
+Within two minutes the Rangar stood facing them, looking more at ease
+than they.
+
+“I was cautioning those savages!” he explained. “They're an escort, but
+they need a reminder of the fact, else they might jolly well imagine
+themselves mountain goats and scatter among the 'Hills'!”
+
+He drew out his wonderful cigarette case and offered it open to
+Courtenay, who hesitated, and then helped himself. King refused.
+
+“Major Courtenay has just told me,” said King, “that nobody resembling
+Yasmini has gone up the Pass recently. Can you explain?”
+
+“You see, I've been watching the Pass,” explained Courtenay.
+
+The Rangar shook his head, blew smoke through his nose and laughed.
+
+“And you did not see her go?” he said, as if he were very much amused.
+
+“No,” said Courtenay. “She didn't go.”
+
+“Can you explain?” asked King rather stiffly.
+
+“Do you mean, can I explain why the major failed to see her? 'Pon my
+soul, King sahib, d'you want me to insult the man? Yasmini is too jolly
+clever for me, or for any other man I ever met; and the major's a
+man, isn't he? He may pack the Khyber so full of men that there's only
+standing room and still she'll go up without his leave if she chooses!
+There is nobody like Yasmini in all the world!”
+
+The Rangar was looking past them, facing the great gorge that lets the
+North of Asia trickle down into India and back again when weather and
+the tribes permit. His eyes had become interested in the distance. King
+wondered why--and looked--and saw. Courtenay saw, too.
+
+“Hail that man and bring him here!” he ordered.
+
+Ismail, keeping his distance with ears and eyes peeled, heard instantly
+and hurried off. He went like the wind and all three watched in silence
+for ten minutes while he headed off a man near the mouth of the Pass,
+stopped him, spoke to him and brought him along. Fifteen minutes later
+an Afridi stood scowling in front of them with a little letter in
+a cleft stick in his hand. He held it out and Courtenay took it and
+sniffed.
+
+“Well--I'll be blessed! A note”--sniff--sniff--“on scented paper!”
+ Sniff--sniff! “Carried down the Khyber in a split stick! Take it,
+King--it's addressed to you.”
+
+King obeyed and sniffed too. It smelt of something far more subtle than
+musk. He recognized the same strange scent that had been wafted from
+behind Yasmini's silken hangings in her room in Delhi. As he unfolded
+the note--it was not sealed--he found time for a swift glance at Rewa
+Gunga's face. The Rangar seemed interested and amused.
+
+        “Dear Captain King,” the note ran, in English.  “Kindly
+        be quick to follow me, because there is much talk of a
+        lashkar getting ready for a raid.  I shall wait for
+        you in Khinjan, whither my messenger shall show the way.
+        Please let him keep his rifle.  Trust him, and Rewa
+        Gunga and my thirty whom you brought with you.  The
+        messenger's name is Darya Khan.
+
+                “Your servant,
+
+                        “Ysamini.”
+
+He passed the note to Courtenay, who read it and passed it back.
+
+“Are you the messenger who is to show this sahib the road to Khinjan?”
+ he asked.
+
+“Aye!”
+
+“But you are one of three who left here and went up the Pass at dawn! I
+recognize you.”
+
+“Aye!” said the man. “She met me and gave me this letter and sent me
+back.”
+
+“How great is the lashkar that is forming?” asked Courtenay.
+
+“Some say three thousand men. They speak truth. They who say five
+thousand are liars. There is a lashkar.”
+
+“And she went up alone?” King murmured aloud in Pashtu.
+
+“Is the moon alone in the sky?” the fellow asked, and King smiled at
+him.
+
+“Let us hurry after her, sahib!” urged Rewa Gunga, and King looked
+straight into his eyes, that were like pools of fire, just as they had
+been that night in the room in Delhi. He nodded and the Rangar grinned.
+
+“Better wait until dawn,” advised Courtenay. “The Pass is supposed to be
+closed at dusk.”
+
+“I shall have to ask for special permission, sir.”
+
+“Granted, of course.”
+
+“Then, we'll start at eight to-night!” said King, glancing at his watch
+and snapping the gold case shut.
+
+“Dine with me,” said Courtenay.
+
+“Yes, please. Got to pack first. Daren't trust anybody else.”
+
+“Very well. We'll dine in my tent at six-thirty,” said Courtenay. “So
+long!”
+
+“So long, sir,” said King, and each went about his own business, King
+with the Rangar, and Ismail and all thirty prisoners at his heels, and
+Courtenay alone, but that much more determined.
+
+“I'll find out,” the major muttered, “how she got up the Pass without my
+knowing it. Somebody's tail shall be twisted for this!”
+
+But he did not find out until King told him, and that was many days
+later, when a terrible cloud no longer threatened India from the North.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+
+
+     Oh, a broken blade,
+     And an empty bag,
+     And a sodden kit,
+     And a foundered nag,
+     And a whimpering wind
+     Are more or less
+     Ground for a gentleman's distress.
+     Yet the blade will cut,
+     (He should swing with a will!)
+     And the emptiest bag
+     He may readiest fill;
+     And the nag will trot
+     If the man has a mind,
+     So the kit he may dry
+     In the whimpering wind.
+     Shades of a gallant past--confess!
+     How many fights were won with less?
+
+
+“I think I envy you!” said Courtenay.
+
+They were seated in Courtenay's tent, face to face across the low table,
+with guttering lights between and Ismail outside the tent handing plates
+and things to Courtenay's servant inside.
+
+“You're about the first who has admitted it,” said King.
+
+Not far from them a herd of pack-camels grunted and bubbled after the
+evening meal. The evening breeze brought the smoke of dung fires down
+to them, and an Afghan--one of the little crowd of traders who had come
+down with the camels three hours ago--sang a wailing song about his
+lady-love. Overhead the sky was like black velvet, pierced with silver
+holes.
+
+“You see, you can't call our end of this business war--it's sport,”
+ said Courtenay. “Two battalions of Khyber Rifles, hired to hold the Pass
+against their own relations. Against them a couple of hundred thousand
+tribesmen, very hungry for loot, armed with up-to-date rifles, thanks
+to Russia yesterday and Germany to-day, and all perfectly well aware
+that a world war is in progress. That's sport, you know--not the 'image
+and likeness of war' that Jorrocks called it, but the real red root. And
+you've got a mystery thrown in to give it piquancy. I haven't found out
+yet how Yasmini got up the Pass without my knowledge. I thought it was a
+trick. Didn't believe she'd gone. Yet all my men swear they know she
+has gone, and not one of them will own to having seen her go! What d'you
+think of that?”
+
+“Tell you later,” said King, “when I've been in the 'Hills' a while.”
+
+“What d'you suppose I'm going to say, eh? Shall I enter in my diary that
+a chit came down the Pass from a woman who never went up it? Or shall I
+say she went up while I was looking the other way?”
+
+“Help yourself!” laughed King.
+
+“Laugh on! I envy you! If the worst comes to the worst, you'll have
+had the best end of it. If you fail up there in the 'Hills' you'll get
+scoughed and be done with you. You'll at least have had a show. All we
+shall know of your failure will be the arrival of the flood! We'll be
+swamped ingloriously--shot, skinned alive and crucified without a chance
+of doing anything but wait for it! You're in luck--you can move about
+and keep off the fidgets!”
+
+For a while, as he ate Courtenay's broiled quail, King did not answer.
+But the merry smile had left his eyes and he seemed for once to be
+letting his mind dwell on conditions as they concerned himself.
+
+“How many men have you at the fort?” he asked at last.
+
+“Two hundred. Why?”
+
+“All natives?”
+
+“To a man.”
+
+        “Like 'em?”
+
+“What's the use of talking?” answered Courtenay. “You know what it means
+when men of an alien race stand up to you and grin when they salute.
+They're my own.”
+
+King nodded. “Die with you, eh?”
+
+“To the last man,” said Courtenay quietly with that conviction that can
+only be arrived at in one way, and that not the easiest.
+
+“I'd die alone,” said King. “It'll be lonely in the 'Hills.' Got any
+more quail?”
+
+And that was all he ever did say on that subject, then or at any other
+time.
+
+“Here's to her!” laughed Courtenay at last, rising and holding up his
+glass. “We can't explain her, so let's drink to her! No heel-taps!
+Here's to Rewa Gunga's mistress, Yasmini!”
+
+“May she show good hunting!” answered King, draining his glass; and it
+was his first that day. “If it weren't for that note of hers that came
+down the Pass, and for one or two other things, I'd almost believe her
+a myth--one of those supposititious people who are supposed to express
+some ideal or other. Not an hallucination, you understand--nor exactly
+an embodied spirit, either. Perhaps the spirit of a problem. Let y be
+the Khyber district, z the tribes, and x the spirit of the rumpus. Find
+x. Get me?”
+
+“Not exactly. Got quinine in your kit, by the way?”
+
+“Plenty, thanks.”
+
+“What shall you do first after you get up the Pass? Call on your brother
+at Ali Masjid? He's likely to know a lot by the time you get there.”
+
+“Not sure,” said King. “May and may not. I'd like to see him. Haven't
+seen the old chap in a donkey's age. How is he?”
+
+“Well two days ago,” said Courtenay. “What's your general plan?”
+
+“Hunt!” said King. “Hunt for x and report. Hunt for the spirit of the
+coming ruction and try to scrag it! Live in the open when I can, sleep
+with the lice when it rains or snows, eat dead goat and bad bread, I
+expect; scratch myself when I'm not looking, and take a tub at the first
+opportunity. When you see me on my way back, have a bath made ready for
+me, will you--and keep to windward!”
+
+“Certainly!” said Courtenay. “What's the Rangar going to do with that
+mare of his? Suppose he'll leave her at Ali Masjid? He'll have to leave
+her somewhere on the way. She'll get stolen. Gad! That's the brightest
+notion yet! I'll make a point of buying her from the first horse-thief
+who comes traipsing down the Pass!”
+
+“Here's wishing you luck!” said King. “It's time to go, sir.”
+
+He rose, and Courtenay walked with him to where his party waited in the
+dark, chilled by the cold wind whistling down the Khyber. Rewa Gunga
+sat, mounted, at their head, and close to him his personal servant rode
+another horse. Behind them were the mules, and then in a cluster, each
+with a load of some sort on his head, were the thirty prisoners, and
+Ismail took charge of them officiously. Darya Khan, the man who had
+brought the letter down the Pass, kept close to Ismail.
+
+“Are you armed?” King asked, as soon as he could see the whites of the
+Rangar's eyes through the gloom.
+
+“You jolly well bet I am!” the Rangar laughed.
+
+King mounted, and Courtenay shook hands; then he went to Rewa Gunga's
+side and shook hands with him, too.
+
+“Good-by!” called King.
+
+“Good-by and good luck!”
+
+“Forward! March!” King ordered, and the little procession started.
+
+“Oh, men of the 'Hills,' ye look like ghosts--like graveyard ghosts!”
+ jeered Courtenay, as they all filed past him. “Ye look like dead men,
+going to be judged!”
+
+Nobody answered. They strode behind the horses, with the swift silent
+strides of men who are going home to the “Hills”; but even they, born in
+the “Hills”' and knowing them as a wolf-pack knows its hunting-ground,
+were awed by the gloom of Khyber-mouth ahead. King's voice was the first
+to break the silence, and he did not speak until Courtenay was out of
+ear-shot. Then:
+
+“Men of the 'Hills'!” he called. “Kuch dar nahin hai!”
+
+“Nahin hai! Hah!” shouted Ismail. “So speaks a man! Hear that, ye
+mountain folk! He says, 'There is no such thing as fear!'”
+
+In his place in the lead, King whistled softly to himself; but he drew
+an automatic pistol from its place beneath his armpit and transferred it
+to a readier position.
+
+Fear or no fear, Khyber-mouth is haunted after dark by the men whose
+blood-feuds are too reeking raw to let them dare go home and for whom
+the British hangman very likely waits a mile or two farther south. It is
+one of the few places in the world where a pistol is better than a thick
+stick.
+
+Boulder, crag and loose rock faded into gloom behind; in front on both
+hands ragged hillsides were beginning to close in; and the wind, whose
+home is in Allah's refuse heap, whistled as it searched busily among
+the black ravines. Then presently the shadow of the thousand-foot-high
+Khyber walls began to cover them, and King drew rein to count them all
+and let them close up. To have let them straggle after that point would
+be tantamount to murder probably.
+
+“Ride last!” he ordered Rewa Gunga. “You've got the only other pistol,
+haven't you?”
+
+Darya Khan, who had brought the letter, had a rifle; so King gave him a
+roving commission on the right flank.
+
+They moved on again after five minutes, in the same deep silence,
+looking like ghosts in search of somebody to ferry them across the Styx.
+Only the glow of King's cheroot, and the lesser, quicker fire of Rewa
+Gunga's cigarette, betrayed humanity, except that once or twice King's
+horse would put a foot wrong and be spoken to.
+
+“Hold up!”
+
+But from five or ten yards away that might have been a new note in the
+gaining wind or even nothing.
+
+After a while King's cheroot went out, and he threw it away. A little
+later Rewa Gunga threw away his cigarette. After that, the veriest
+five-year-old among the Zakka Khels, watching sleepless over the rim of
+some stone watch-tower, could have taken oath that the Khyber's unburied
+dead were prowling in search of empty graves. Probably their uncanny
+silence was their best protection; but Rewa Gunga chose to break it
+after a time.
+
+“King sahib!” he called softly, repeating it louder and more loudly
+until King heard him. “Slowly! Not so fast!”
+
+“Why?”
+
+King did not check speed by a fraction, but the Rangar legged his mare
+into a canter and forced him to pull out to the left of the track and
+make room.
+
+“Because, sahib, there are men among those boulders, and to go too
+fast is to make them think you are afraid! To seem afraid is to invite
+attack! Can we defend ourselves, with three firearms between us? Look!
+What was that?”
+
+They were at the point where the road begins to lead up-hill, westward,
+leaving the bed of a ravine and ascending to join the highway built
+by British engineers. Below, to left and right, was pit-mouth gloom,
+shadows amid shadows, full of eerie whisperings, and King felt the short
+hair on his neck begin to rise.
+
+So he urged his horse forward, because what Rewa Gunga said is true.
+There is only one surer key to trouble in the Khyber than to seem
+afraid--and that is to be afraid. And to have sat his horse there
+listening to the Rangar's whisperings and trying to see through shadows
+would have been to invite fear, of the sort that grows into panic.
+
+The Rangar followed him, close up, and both horse and mare sensed
+excitement. The mare's steel shoes sent up a shower of sparks, and King
+turned to rebuke the Rangar. Yet he did not speak. Never, in all the
+years he had known India and the borderland beyond, had he seen eyes so
+suggestive of a tiger's in the dark! Yet they were not the same color as
+a tiger's, nor the same size, nor the same shape!
+
+“Look, sahib!”
+
+“Look at what?”
+
+“Look!”
+
+After a second or two he caught a glimpse of bluish flame that flashed
+suddenly and died again, somewhere below to the right. Then all at once
+the flame burned brighter and steadier and began to move and to grow.
+
+“Halt!” King thundered; and his voice was as sharp and unexpected as a
+pistol-crack. This was something tangible, that a man could tackle--a
+perfect antidote for nerves.
+
+The blue light continued on a zigzag course, as if a man were running
+among boulders with an unusual sort of torch; and as there was no answer
+King drew his pistol, took about thirty seconds' aim and fired. He fired
+straight at the blue light.
+
+It vanished instantly, into measureless black silence.
+
+“Now you've jolly well done it, haven't you!”' the Rangar laughed in his
+ear. “That was her blue light--Yasmini's!”
+
+It was a minute before King answered, for both animals were all but
+frantic with their sense of their riders' state of mind; it needed
+horsemanship to get them back under control.
+
+“How do you know whose light it was?” King demanded, when the horse and
+mare were head to head again.
+
+“It was prearranged. She promised me a signal at the point where I am to
+leave the track!”
+
+“Where's that guide?” demanded King; and Darya Khan came forward out of
+the night, with his rifle cocked and ready.
+
+“Did she not say Khinjan is the destination?”'
+
+“Aye!” the fellow answered.
+
+“I know the way to Khinjan. That is not it. Get down there and find out
+what that light was. Shout back what you find!”
+
+The man obeyed instantly and sprang down into darkness. But King had
+hardly given the order when shame told him he had sent a native on an
+errand he had no liking for himself.
+
+“Come back!” he shouted. “I'll go.”
+
+But the man had gone, slipping noiselessly in the dark from rock to
+rock.
+
+So King drove both spurs home, and set his unwilling horse to scrambling
+downward at an angle he could not guess, into blackness he could feel,
+trusting the animal to find a footing where his own eyes could make out
+nothing.
+
+To his disgust he heard the Rangar follow immediately. To his even
+greater disgust the black mare overtook him. And even then, with his own
+mount stumbling and nearly pitching him headforemost at each lurch, he
+was forced to admire the mare's goatlike agility, for she descended into
+the gorge in running leaps, never setting a wrong foot. When he and his
+horse reached the bottom at last he found the Rangar waiting for him.
+
+“This way, sahib!”
+
+The next he knew sparks from the black mare's heels were kicking up in
+front of him, and a wild ride had begun such as he had never yet dreamed
+of. There was no catching up, for the black mare could gallop two to
+his horse's one; but he set his teeth and followed into solid night,
+trusting ear, eye, guesswork and the God of Secret Service men who loves
+the reckless.
+
+Once in a minute or so he would see a spark, or a shower of them, where
+the mare took a turn in a hurry. Once in every two or three minutes he
+caught sight for a second of the same blue siren light that had started
+the race. He suspected that there were many torches placed at intervals.
+It could not be one man running. More than once it occurred to him to
+draw and shoot, but that thought died into the darkness whence it came.
+Never once while he rode did he forget to admire the Rangar's courage or
+the black mare's speed.
+
+His own horse developed a speed and stamina he had not suspected, and
+probably the Rangar did not dare extend the mare to her limit in the
+dark; at all events, for ten, perhaps fifteen, minutes of breathless
+galloping he almost made a race of it, keeping the Rangar, either within
+sight or sound.
+
+But then the mare swerved suddenly behind a boulder and was gone. He
+spurred round the same great rock a minute later, and was faced by a
+blank wall of shale that brought his horse up all standing. It led
+steep up for a thousand feet to the sky-line. There was not so much as a
+goat-track to show in which direction the mare had gone, nor a sound of
+any kind to guide him.
+
+He dismounted and stumbled about on foot for about ten minutes with his
+eyes two feet from the earth, trying to find some trace of hoof. Then he
+listened, with his ear to the ground. There was no result.
+
+He knew better than to shout, for that would sound like a cry of
+distress, and there is no mercy whatever in the “Hills” for lost
+wanderers, or for men who seem lost. He had not a doubt there were
+men with long jezails lurking not far away, to say nothing of those
+responsible for the blue torchlight.
+
+After some thought be mounted and began to hunt the way back,
+remembering turns and twists with a gift for direction that natives
+might well have envied him. He found his way back to the foot of the
+road at a trot, where ninety-nine men out of almost any hundred would
+have been lost hopelessly; and close to the road he overtook Darya Khan,
+hugging his rifle and staring about like a scorpion at bay.
+
+“Did you expect that blue light, and this galloping away?” he asked.
+
+“Nay, sahib; I knew nothing of it! I was told to lead the way to
+Khinjan.”
+
+“Come on, then!”
+
+He set his horse at the boulder-strewn slope and had to dismount to lead
+him at the end of half a minute. At the end of a minute both he and the
+messenger were hauling at the reins and the horse had grown frantic from
+fear of falling backward. He shouted for help, and Ismail and another
+man came leaping down, looking like the devils of the rocks, to lend
+their strength. Ismail tightened his long girdle and stung the other two
+with whiplash words, so that Darya Khan overcame prejudice to the point
+of stowing his rifle between some rocks and lending a hand. Then it took
+all four of them fifteen minutes to heave and haul the struggling animal
+to the level road above.
+
+There, with eyes long grown used to the dark, King stared about him,
+recovering his breath and feeling in his pockets for a fresh cheroot and
+matches. He struck a match and watched it to be sure his hand did not
+shake before he spoke, because one of Cocker's rules is that a man must
+command himself before trying it on others.
+
+“Where are the others?” he asked, when he was certain of himself.
+
+“Gone!” boomed Ismail, still panting, for he had heaved and dragged more
+stoutly than had all the rest together.
+
+King took a dozen pulls at the cheroot and stared about again. In the
+middle of the road stood his second horse, and three mules with his
+baggage, including the unmarked medicine chest. Close to them were
+three men, making the party now only six all told, including Darya Khan,
+himself and Ismail.
+
+“Gone whither?” he asked.
+
+“Whither?”
+
+Ismail's voice was eloquent of shocked surprise.
+
+“They followed! Was it then thy baggage on the other mules? Were they
+thy men? They led the mules and went!”
+
+“Who ordered them?”
+
+“Allah! Need the night be ordered to follow the Day?”
+
+“Who told them whither to go?”
+
+“Who told the moon where the night was?” Ismail answered.
+
+“And thou?”
+
+“I am thy man! She bade me be thy man!”
+
+“And these?”
+
+“Try them!”
+
+King bethought him of his wrist, that was heavy with the weight of gold
+on it. He drew back his sleeve and held it up.
+
+“May God be with thee!” boomed all five men at once, and the Khyber
+night gave back their voices, like the echoing of a well.
+
+King took his reins and mounted.
+
+“What now?” asked Ismail, picking up the leather bag that he regarded as
+his own particular charge.
+
+“Forward!” said King. “Come along!”
+
+He began to set a fairly fast pace, Ismail leading the spare horse and
+the others towing the mules along. Except for King, who was modern and
+out of the picture, they looked like Old Testament patriarchs, hurrying
+out of Egypt, as depicted in the illustrated Bibles of a generation
+ago--all leaning forward--each man carrying a staff--and none looking to
+the right or left.
+
+After a time the moon rose and looked at them from over a distant ridge
+that was thousands of feet higher than the ragged fringe of Khyber wall.
+The little mangy jackals threw up their heads to howl at it; and after
+that there was pale light diffused along the track, and they could
+see so well that King set a faster pace, and they breathed hard in the
+effort to keep up. He did not draw rein until it was nearly time for
+the Pass to begin narrowing and humping upward to the narrow gut at Ali
+Masjid. But then he halted suddenly. The jackals had ceased howling, and
+the very spirit of the Khyber seemed to hold its breath and listen.
+
+In that shuddersome ravine unusual sounds will rattle along sometimes
+from wall to wall and gully to gully, multiplying as they go, until
+night grows full of thunder. So it was now that they heard a staccato
+cannonade--not very loud yet, but so quick, so pulsating, so filling to
+the ears that he could judge nothing about the sound at all, except that
+whatever caused it must be round a corner out of sight.
+
+At first, for a few minutes King suspected it was Rewa Gunga's mare,
+galloping over hard rock away ahead of him. Then he knew it was a horse
+approaching. After that he became nearly sure he was mistaken altogether
+and that the drums were being beaten at a village--until he remembered
+there was no village near enough and no drums in any case.
+
+It was the behavior of the horse he rode, and of the led one and the
+mules, that announced at last beyond all question that a horse was
+coming down the Khyber in a hurry. One of the mules brayed until the
+whole gorge echoed with the insult, and a man hit him hard on the nose
+to silence him.
+
+King legged his horse into the shadow of a great rock. And after
+shepherding the men and mules into another shadow, Ismail came and held
+his stirrup, with the leather bag in the other hand. The bag fascinated
+him, because he did not know what was in it, and it was plain that he
+meant to cling to it until death or King should put an end to curiosity.
+
+King drew his pistol. Ismail drew in his breath with a hissing sound, as
+if he and not King were the marksman. King notched the foresight against
+the corner of a crag, at a height that ought to be an inch or two above
+an oncoming horse's ears, and Ismail nodded sagely. Whoever now should
+gallop round that rock would be obliged to cross the line of fire. Such
+are the vagaries of the Khyber's night echoes that it was a long five
+minutes yet before a man appeared at last, riding like the night wind,
+on a horse that seemed to be very nearly on his last legs. The beast was
+going wildly, sobbing, with straggled ears.
+
+Instead of speaking, King spurred out of the shadow and blocked the
+oncoming horseman's way, making his own horse meet the other shoulder to
+breast, knocking most of the remaining wind out of him. At risk of his
+own life, Ismail seized the man's reins. The sparks flew, and there
+was a growled oath; but the long and the short of it was that the rider
+squinted uncomfortably down the barrel of King's repeating pistol.
+
+“Give an account of yourself!” commanded King.
+
+The man did not answer. He was a jezailchi of the Khyber
+Rifles--hook-nosed as an osprey--black-bearded--with white teeth
+glistening out of a gap in the darkness of his lower face. And he was
+armed with a British government rifle, although that is no criterion
+in that borderland of professional thieves where many a man has offered
+himself for enlistment with a stolen government rifle in his grasp.
+
+The waler he rode was an officer's charger. The poor brute sobbed and
+heaved and sweated in his tracks as his rightful owner surely had never
+made him do.
+
+“Whither?” King demanded.
+
+“Jamrud!”
+
+The jezailchi growled the one-word answer with one eye on King, but the
+other eye still squinted down the pistol barrel warily.
+
+“Have you a letter?”
+
+The man did not answer.
+
+“You may speak to me. I am of your regiment. I am Captain King.”
+
+“That is a lie, and a poor one!” the fellow answered. “But a very little
+while ago I spoke with King sahib in Ali Masjid Fort, and he is no
+cappitin, he is leftnant. Therefore thou art a liar twice over--nay,
+three times! Thou art no officer of Khyber Rifles! I am a jezailchi, and
+I know them all!”
+
+“None the less,” said King, “I am an officer of the Khyber Rifles, newly
+appointed. I asked you, have you a letter?”
+
+“Aye!”
+
+“Let me see it.”
+
+“Nay!”
+
+“I order you!”
+
+“Nay! I am a true man! I will eat the letter rather!”
+
+“Tell me who wrote it, then.”
+
+But the fellow shook his head, still eying the pistol as if it were a
+snake about to strike.
+
+“I have eaten the salt!” he said. “May dogs eat me if I break faith! Who
+art thou, to ask me to break faith? An arrficer? That must be a lie!
+The letter is from him who wrote it, to whom I bear it--and that is my
+answer if I die this minute!”
+
+King let his reins fall and raised his left wrist until the moonlight
+glinted on the gold of his bracelet under the jezailchi's very eyes.
+
+“May God be with thee!” said the man at once.
+
+“From whom is your letter, and to whom?” asked King, wondering what the
+men in the clubs at home would say if they knew that a woman's bracelet
+could outweigh authority on British sod; for the Khyber Pass is as much
+British as the air is an eagle's or Korea Japanese, or Panama United
+States American, and the Khyber jezailchis are paid to help keep it so.
+
+“From the karnal sahib (colonel) at Landi Kotal, whose horse I ride,”
+ said the jezailchi slowly, “to the arrficer at Jamrud. To King sahib,
+the arrficer at Ali Masjid I bore a letter also, and left it as I
+passed.”
+
+“Had they no spare horse at Ali Masjid? That beast is foundered.”
+
+“There are two horses there, and both lame. The man who thou sayest is
+thy brother is heavy on horses.”
+
+King nodded. “What is in the letter?” he asked.
+
+“Nay! Have I eyes that can see through paper?”
+
+“Thou hast ears that can listen!” answered King.
+
+“In the letter that I left at Ali Masjid there is news of the lashkar
+that is gathering in the 'Hills,' above Ali Masjid and beyond Khinjan.
+King sahib is ordered to be awake and wary.”
+
+“And to lame no more horses jumping them over rocks!”
+
+“Nay, the karnal sahib said he is to ride after no more jackals with a
+spear!”
+
+“Same old game!” said King to himself. “What knowest thou of the lashkar
+that is gathering?”
+
+“I? Oh, a little. An uncle of mine, and three half-brothers, and a
+brother are of its number! One came at night to tempt me to join--but
+I have eaten the salt. It was I who first warned our karnal sahib. Now,
+let me by!”
+
+“Nay, wait!” ordered King. But he lowered his pistol point.
+
+To hold up a despatch rider was about as irregular as any proceeding
+could be; but it was within his province to find out how far the Khyber
+jezailchis could be trusted and within his power more than to make up
+the lost time. So that the irregularity did not trouble him much.
+
+“Does this other letter tell of the lashkar, too?”
+
+“Am I God, that I should know? But of what else should the karnal sahib
+write?”
+
+“What is the object of the rising?” King asked him next; and the man
+threw his head back to laugh like a wolf. Laughter, at night in the
+Khyber, is an insult. Ismail chattered into his beard; but King sat
+still.
+
+“Object? What but to force the Khyber and burst through into India and
+loot? What but to plunder, now that English backs are turned the other
+way?”
+
+“Who said their backs are turned?” demanded King.
+
+“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ho! Hear him!”
+
+The Khyber echoed the mockery away and away into the distance.
+
+“Their backs are this way and their faces that! The kites know it! The
+vultures know it! The little jackals know it! The little butchas in
+the valley villages all know it! Ask the rocks, and the grass--the very
+water running from the 'Hills'! They all know that the English fight for
+life!”
+
+“And the Khyber jezailchis? What of them?” King asked.
+
+“They know it better than any!”
+
+“And?”
+
+“They make ready, even as I.”
+
+“For what?”
+
+“For what Allah shall decide! We ate the salt, we jezailchis. We chose,
+and we ate of our own free will. We have been paid the price we named,
+in silver and rifles and clothing. The arrficers the sirkar sent us are
+men of faith who have made no trouble with our women. What, then, should
+the Khyber jezailchis do? For a little while there will be fighting--or,
+if we be very brave and our arrficers skillful, and Allah would fain see
+sport, then for a longer while. Then we shall be overridden. Then the
+Khyber will be a roaring river of men pouring into India, as my father's
+father told me it has often been! India shall bleed in these days--but
+there will be fighting in the Khyber first!”
+
+“And what of her? Of Yasmini?” King asked.
+
+“Thou wearest that--and askest what of her? Nay--tell!”
+
+“Should she order the jezailchis to be false to the salt--?”
+
+“Such a question!”
+
+The man clucked into his beard and began to fidget in the saddle.
+King gave him another view of the bracelet, and again he found a civil
+answer.
+
+“We of the Rifles have her leave to be loyal to the salt, for, said she,
+otherwise how could we be true men; and she loves no liars. From the
+first, when she first won our hearts in the 'Hills,' she gave us of the
+Rifles leave to be true men first and her servants afterward! We may
+love her--as we do!--and yet fight against her, if so Allah wills--and
+she will yet love us!”
+
+“Where is she?” King asked him suddenly, and the man began to laugh
+again.
+
+“Let me by!” he shouted truculently. “Who am I to sit a horse and gossip
+in the Khyber? Let me by, I say!”
+
+“I will let you by when you have told me where she is!”
+
+“Then I die here, and very likely thou, too!” the man answered, bringing
+his rifle to the port in front of him so quickly that he almost had King
+at a disadvantage. As it was, King was quick enough to balance matters
+by covering him with the pistol again. The horses sensed excitement and
+began to stir. With a laugh the jezailchi let the rifle fall across his
+lap, and at that King put the pistol out of sight.
+
+“Fool!” hissed Ismail in his ear; but King knows the “Hills” better in
+some ways than the savages who live in them; they, for instance, never
+seem able to judge whether there will be a fight presently or not.
+
+“Why won't you tell me where she is?” he asked in his friendliest voice,
+and that would wheedle secrets from the Sphynx.
+
+“Her secrets are her own, and may Allah help her guard them! I will tear
+my tongue out first!”
+
+“Enviable woman!” murmured King. “Pass, friend!” he ordered, reining
+aside. “Take my spare horse and leave me that weary one, so you will
+recover the lost time and more into the bargain.”
+
+The man changed horses gladly, saying nothing. When he had shifted the
+saddle and mounted, he began to ride off with a great air, not so much
+as deigning to scowl at Ismail. But he had not ridden a dozen paces when
+he sat round in the saddle and drew rein.
+
+“Sahib!” he called. “Sahib!”
+
+King waited. He had waited for this very thing and could afford to wait
+a minute longer.
+
+“Hast thou--is there--does the sahib--I have not tasted--”
+
+He made a sign with his hand that men recognize in pretty nearly every
+land under the sun.
+
+“So-ho!” laughed King, patting his hip pocket, from which the cap of a
+silver-topped flask had been protruding ever since he put the pistol out
+of sight. “So our copper's hot, eh?”
+
+“May Allah do more to me if my throat is not lined with the fires of
+Eblis!”
+
+“But the Kalamullah!” King objected. “What saith the Prophet?”
+
+“The Prophet forbade the faithful to drink wine,” said the jezailchi.
+“He said nothing about whiskey, that I ever heard!”
+
+“Mine is brandy,” said King.
+
+“May Allah bless the sahib's sons and grandsons to the seventh
+generation! May Allah--”
+
+“Tell me about Yasmini first! Where is she?”
+
+“Nay!”
+
+King tapped the flask in his pocket.
+
+“Nay! My throat is dry, but it shalt parch! I know not! As to where she
+is, I know not!”
+
+“Remember, and I will give you the whole of it!”
+
+He drew the flask out of his pocket and rode a little way toward the
+man.
+
+“None can overhear. Tell me now.”
+
+“Nay, sahib! I am silent!”
+
+“Have you passed her on your way?”
+
+The man shook his head--shook it until the whites of his eyes were a
+streak in the middle of his dark face; and when a Hillman is as vehement
+as that he is surely lying.
+
+King set the flask to his own lips and drank a few drops.
+
+“Salaam, sahib!” said the jezaitchi, wheeling his horse to ride away.
+
+King let him ride twenty paces before calling to him to halt.
+
+“Come back!” he ordered, and rode part of the way to meet him.
+
+“I but tried thee, friend!” he said, holding out the flask.
+
+“Allah then preserve me from a second test!”
+
+The jezailchi seized the flask, clapped it to his lips and drained it to
+the last drop while King sat still in the moonlight and smiled at him.
+
+“God grant the giver peace!” he prayed, handing the flask back. The
+kindly East possesses no word for “Thank you.” Then he wheeled the horse
+in a sudden eddy, as polo ponies turn on the Indian plains, and rode
+away down the wind as if the Pass were full of devils in pursuit of him.
+
+King watched him out of sight and then listened until the hoof-beats
+died away and the Pass grew still again.
+
+“The jezailchis'll stand!” he said, lighting a new cheroot. “Good men
+and good luck to 'em!”
+
+Then he rode back to his own men.
+
+“Where starts the trail to Khinjan?” he asked; not that he had forgotten
+it, but to learn who knew.
+
+“This side of Ali Masjid!” they answered all together.
+
+“Two miles this side. More than a mile from here,” said Ismail. “What
+next? Shall we camp here? Here is fuel and a little water. Give the
+word--”
+
+“Nay-forward!” ordered King.
+
+“Forward?” growled Ismail. “With this man it is ever 'forward!' Is there
+neither rest nor fear? Has she bewitched him? Hai! Ye lazy ones! Ho!
+Sons of sloth! Urge the mules faster! Beat the led horse!”
+
+So in weird wan moonlight, King led them forward, straight up the
+narrowing gorge, between cliffs that seemed to fray the very bosom of
+the sky. He smoked a cigar and stared at the view, as if he were off
+to the mountains for a month's sport with dependable shikarris whom he
+knew. Nobody could have looked at him and guessed he was not enjoying
+himself.
+
+“That man,” mumbled Ismail behind him, “is not as other sahibs I have
+known. He is a man, this one! He will do unexpected things!”
+
+“Forward!” King called to them, thinking they were grumbling. “Forward,
+men of the 'Hills'!”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+
+
+
+     The owl he has eyes that are big for his size,
+     And the night like a book he deciphers;
+     “Too-woop!” he asserts, and “Hoo-woo-ip!” he cries,
+     And he means to remark he is awfully wise;
+     But he lags behind us, who are “on” to the lies
+     Of the hairy Himalayan knifers!
+
+     For eyes we be, of Empire, we,
+     Skinned and puckered and quick to see,
+     And nobody guesses how wise we be,
+     Nor hidden in what disguise we be,
+     A-cooking a sudden surprise we be
+     For hairy Himahlyan knifers!
+
+
+After a time King urged his horse to a jog-trot, and the five Hillmen
+pattered in his wake, huddled so close together that the horse could
+easily have kicked more than one of them. The night was cold enough to
+make flesh creep; but it was imagination that herded them until they
+touched the horse's rump and kept the whites of their eyes ever showing
+as they glanced to left and right. The Khyber, fouled by memory, looks
+like the very birthplace of the ghosts when the moon is fitful and a
+mist begins to flow.
+
+“Cheloh!” King called merrily enough; but his horse shied at nothing,
+because horses have an uncanny way of knowing how their riders really
+feel. They led mules and the spare horse, instead of dragging at their
+bridles, pressed forward to have their heads among the men, and every
+once and again there would sound the dull thump of a fist on a beast's
+nose--such being the attitude of men toward the lesser beasts.
+
+They trotted forward until the bed of the Khyber began to grow very
+narrow, and Ali Masjid Fort could not be much more than a mile away, at
+the widest guess. Then King drew rein and dismounted, for he would have
+been challenged had he ridden much farther. A challenge in the Khyber
+after dark consists invariably of a volley at short range, with the mere
+words afterward, and the wise man takes precaution.
+
+“Off with the mules' packs!” he ordered, and the men stood round and
+stared. Darya Khan, leaning on the only rifle in the party, grinned like
+a post-office letter box.
+
+“Truly,” growled Ismail, forgetting past expression of a different
+opinion, “this man is as mad as all the other Englishmen.”
+
+“Were you ever bitten by one?” wondered King aloud.
+
+“God forbid!”
+
+“Then, off with the packs--and hurry!”
+
+Ismail began to obey.
+
+“Thou! Lord of the Rivers! (For that is what Darya Khan means.) What is
+thy calling?”
+
+“Badragga” (guide), he answered. “Did she not send me back down the Pass
+to be a guide?”
+
+“And before that what wast thou?”
+
+“Is that thy business?” he snarled, shifting his rifle-barrel to the
+other hand. “I am what she says I am! She used to call me 'Chikki'--the
+Lifter!--and I was! There are those who were made to know it! If she
+says now I am badragga, shall any say she lies?”
+
+“I say thou art unpacker of mules' burdens!” answered King. “Begin!”
+
+For answer the fellow grinned from ear to ear and thrust the
+rifle-barrel forward insolently. King, with the movement of
+determination that a man makes when about to force conclusions, drew up
+his sleeves above the wrist. At that instant the moon shone through the
+mist and the gold bracelet glittered in the moonlight.
+
+“May God be with thee!” said “Lord of the Rivers” at once. And without
+another word he laid down his rifle and went to help off-load the mules.
+
+King stepped aside and cursed softly. To a man who knows how to enforce
+his own authority, it is worse than galling to be obeyed because he
+wears a woman's favor. But for a vein of wisdom that underlay his pride
+he would have pocketed the bracelet there and then and have refused to
+wear it again. But as he sweated his pride he overheard Ismail growl:
+
+“Good for thee! He had taught thee obedience in another bat of the eye!”
+
+“I obey her!” muttered Darya Khan.
+
+“I, too,” said Ishmail. “So shall he before the week dies! But now it is
+good to obey him. He is an ugly man to disobey!”
+
+“I obey him until she sets me free, then,” grumbled Darya Khan.
+
+“Better for thee!” said Ismail.
+
+The packs were laid on the ground, and the mules shook themselves, while
+the jackals that haunt the Khyber came closer, to sit in a ring and
+watch. King dug a flashlight out of one of the packs, gave it to Ismail
+to hold, sat on the other pack and began to write on a memorandum pad.
+It was a minute before he could persuade Ismail that the flashlight was
+harmless, and another minute before he could get him to hold it still.
+Then, however, he wrote swiftly.
+
+        “In the Khyber, a mile below you.
+
+        “Dear Old Man--I would like to run in and see you, but
+        circumstances don't permit.  Several people sent you
+        their regards by me.  Herewith go two mules and their
+        packs.  Make any use of the mules you like, but store
+        the loads where I can draw on them in case of need.
+        I would like to have a talk with you before taking the
+        rather desperate step I intend, but I don't want to be
+        seen entering or leaving Ali Masjid.  Can you come
+        down the Pass without making your intention known?
+        It is growing misty now.  It ought to be easy.  My men
+        will tell you where I am and show you the way.  Why
+        not destroy this letter?
+
+        “Athelstan.”
+
+He folded the note and stuck a postage stamp on it in lieu of seal. Then
+he examined the packs with the aid of the flashlight, sorted them and
+ordered two of the mules reloaded.
+
+“You three!” he ordered then. “Take the loaded mules into Ali Masjid
+Fort. Take this chit, you. Give it to the sahib in command there.”
+
+They stood and gaped at him, wide-eyed--then came closer to see his
+eyes and to catch any whisper that Ismail might have for them. But
+Ismail and Darya Khan seemed full of having been chosen to stay behind;
+they offered no suggestions--certainly no encouragement to mutiny.
+
+“To hear is to obey!” said the nearest man, seizing the note, for at all
+events that was the easiest task. His action decided the other two. They
+took the mules' leading-reins and followed him. Before they had gone
+ten paces they were all swallowed in the mist that had begun to flow
+southeastward; it closed on them like a blanket, and in a minute more
+the clink of shod hooves had ceased. The night grew still, except for
+the whimpering of jackals. Ismail came nearer and squatted at King's
+feet.
+
+“Why, sahib?” he asked: and Darya Khan came closer, too. King had tied
+the reins of the two horses and the one remaining mule together in a
+knot and was sitting on the pack.
+
+“Why not?” he countered.
+
+Solemn, almost motionless, squatted on their hunkers, they looked like
+two great vultures watching an animal die.
+
+“What have they done that they should be sent away?” asked Ismail. “What
+have they done that they should be sent to the fort, where the arrficer
+will put them in irons?”
+
+“Why should he put them in irons?” asked King.
+
+“Why not? Here in the Khyber there is often a price on men's heads!”
+
+“And not in Delhi?”
+
+“In Delhi these were not known. There were no witnesses in Delhi. In the
+fort at Ali Masjid there will be a dozen ready to swear to them!”
+
+“Then, why did they obey?” asked King.
+
+“What is that on the sahib's wrist?”
+
+“You mean--?”
+
+“Sahib--if she said, 'Walk into the fire or over that Cliff!' there be
+many in these 'Hills' who would obey without murmuring!”
+
+“I have nothing against them,” said King. “As long as they are my men I
+will not send them into a trap.”
+
+“Good!” nodded Ismail and Darya Khan together, but they did not seem
+really satisfied.
+
+“It is good,” said Ismail, “that she should have nothing against thee,
+sahib! Those three men are in thy keeping!”
+
+“And I in thine?” King asked, but neither man answered him.
+
+They sat in silence for five minutes. Then suddenly the two Hillmen
+shuddered, although King did not bat an eyelid. Din burst into being. A
+volley ripped out of the night and thundered down the Pass.
+
+“How-utt! Hukkums dar?” came the insolent challenge half a minute after
+it--the proof positive that Ali Masjid's guards neither slept nor were
+afraid.
+
+A weird wail answered the challenge, and there began a tossing to and
+fro of words, that was prelude to a shouted invitation:
+
+“Ud-vance-frrrennen-orsss-werrul!”
+
+English can be as weirdly distorted as wire, or any other supple medium,
+and native levies advance distortion to the point of art; but the
+language sounds no less good in the chilly gloom of a Khyber night.
+
+Followed another wait, this time of half an hour. Then a man's
+footsteps--a booted, leather-heeled man, striding carelessly. Not far
+behind him was the softer noise of sandals. The man began to whistle
+Annie Laurie.
+
+“Charles? That you?” called King.
+
+“That you, old man?”
+
+A man in khaki stepped into the moonlight. He was so nearly the image of
+Athelstan King that Ismail and Darya Khan stood up and stared. Athelstan
+strode to meet him. Their walk was the same. Angle for angle, line
+for line, they might have been one man and his shadow, except for
+three-quarters of an inch of stature.
+
+“Glad to see you, old man,” said Athelstan.
+
+“Sure, old chap!” said Charles; and they shook hands.
+
+“What's the desperate proposal?” asked the younger.
+
+“I'll tell you when we are alone.”
+
+His brother nodded and stood a step aside. The three who had taken the
+note to the fort came closer--partly to call attention to themselves,
+partly to claim credit, partly because the outer silence frightened
+them. They elbowed Ismail and Darya Khan, and one of them received a
+savage blow in the stomach by way of retort from Ismail. Before that
+spark could start an explosion Athelstan interfered.
+
+“Ismail! Take two men. Go down the Pass out of ear-shot, and keep watch!
+Come back when I whistle thus--but no sooner!”
+
+He put fingers between his teeth and blew until the night shrilled back
+at him. Ismail seized the leather bag and started to obey.
+
+“Leave that bag. Leave it, I say!”
+
+“But some man may steal it, sahib. How shall a thief know there is no
+money in it?”
+
+“Leave it and go!”
+
+Ismail departed, grumbling, and King turned on Darya Khan.
+
+“Take the remaining man, and go up the Pass!” he ordered. “Stand out of
+ear-shot and keep watch. Come when I whistle!”
+
+“But this one has a belly ache where Ismail smote him! Can a man with
+a belly ache stand guard? His moaning will betray both him and me!”
+ objected “Lord of the Rivers.”
+
+“Take him and go!” commanded King.
+
+“But--”
+
+King was careful now not to show his bracelet.
+
+But there was something in his eye and in his attitude--a subtle
+suggestive something-or-other about him--that was rather more convincing
+than a pistol or a stick. Darya Khan thrust his rifle-end into the hurt
+man's stomach for encouragement and started off into the mist.
+
+“Come and ache out of the sahibs' sight!” he snarled.
+
+In a minute King and his brother stood unseen, unheard in the shadow by
+a patch of silver moonlight. Athelstan sat down on the mule's pack.
+
+“Well?” said the younger. “Tell me. I shall have to hurry. You see I'm
+in charge back there. They saw me come out, but I hope to teach 'em a
+lesson going back.”
+
+Athelstan nodded. “Good!” he said. “I've a roving commission. I'm
+ordered to enter Khinjan Caves.”
+
+His brother whistled. “Tall order! What's your plan?”
+
+“Haven't one--yet. Know more when I'm nearer Khinjan. You can help no
+end.”
+
+“How? Name it!”
+
+“I shall go up in disguise. Nobody can put the stain on as well as you.
+But tell me something first. Any news of a holy war yet?”
+
+His brother nodded. “Plenty of talk about one to come,” he said. “We
+keep hearing of that lashkar that we can't locate, under a mullah whose
+name seems to change with the day of the week. And there are everlasting
+tales about the 'Heart of the Hills.”'
+
+“No explanation of 'em?” Athelstan asked him.
+
+“None! Not a thing!”
+
+“D'you know of Yasmini?”
+
+“Heard of her of course,” said his brother.
+
+“Has she come up the Pass?”
+
+His brother laughed. “No, neither she nor a coach and four.”
+
+“I have heard the contrary,” said Athelstan.
+
+“Heard what, exactly?”
+
+“She's up the Pass ahead of me.”
+
+“She hasn't passed Ali Masjid!” said his brother, and Athelstan nodded.
+
+“Are the Turks in the show yet?” asked Charles.
+
+“Not yet. But I know they're expected in.”
+
+“You bet they're expected in!” The younger man grinned from ear to ear.
+“They're working both tides under to prepare the tribes for it. They
+flatter themselves they can set alight a holy war that will put Timour
+Ilang to shame. You should hear my jezailchies talk at night when they
+think I'm not listening!”
+
+“The jezailchies'll stand though,” said Athelstan.
+
+“Stake my life on it!” said his brother. “They'll stick to the last
+man!”
+
+“I can't tell you,” said Athelstan, “why we're not attacking brother
+Turk before he's ready. I imagine Whitehall has its hands full. But it's
+likely enough that the Turk will throw in his lot with the Prussians the
+minute he's ready to begin. Meanwhile my job is to help make the holy
+war seem unprofitable to the tribes, so that they'll let the Turk down
+hard when he calls on 'em. Every day that I can point to forts held
+strongly in the Khyber is a day in my favor. There are sure to be raids.
+In fact, the more the merrier, provided they're spasmodic. We must keep
+'em separated--keep 'em from swarming too fast--while I sow other seeds
+among 'em.”
+
+His brother nodded. Sowing seeds was almost that family's hereditary
+job. Athelstan continued:
+
+“Hang on to Ali Masjid like a leech, old man! The day one raiding
+lashkar gets command of the Khyber's throat, the others'll all believe
+they've won the game. Nothing'll stop 'em then! Look out for traps.
+Smash 'em on sight. But don't follow up too far!”
+
+“Sure,” said Charles.
+
+“Help me with the stain now, will you?”
+
+With his flash-light burning as if its battery provided current by the
+week instead of by the minute, Athelstan dragged open the mule's pack
+and produced a host of things. He propped a mirror against the pack and
+squatted in front of it. Then he passed a little bottle to his brother,
+and Charles attended to the chin-strap mark that would have betrayed him
+a British officer in any light brighter than dusk. In a few minutes his
+whole face was darkened to one hue, and Charles stepped back to look at
+it.
+
+“Won't need to wash yourself for a month!” he said. “The dirt won't
+show!” He sniffed at the bottle. “But that stain won't come off if you
+do wash--never worry! You'll do finely.”
+
+“Not yet, I won't!” said Athelstan, picking up a little safety razor and
+beginning on his mustache. In a minute he had his upper lip bare. Then
+his brother bent over him and rubbed in stain where the scrubby mustache
+had been.
+
+After that Athelstan unlocked the leather bag that had caused Ismail so
+much concern and shook out from it a pile of odds and ends at which
+his brother nodded with perfect understanding. The principal item was
+a piece of silk--forty or fifty yards of it--that he proceeded to
+bind into a turban on his head, his brother lending him a guiding,
+understanding finger at every other turn. When that was done, the man
+who had said he looked in the least like a British officer would have
+lied.
+
+One after another he drew on native garments, picking them from the pile
+beside him. So, by rapid stages he developed into a native hakim--by
+creed a converted Hindu, like Rewa Gunga,--one of the men who practise
+yunani, or modern medicine, without a license and with a very great deal
+of added superstition, trickery and guesswork.
+
+“I wouldn't trust you with a ha'penny!” announced his brother when he
+had done.
+
+“Really? As good as all that?”
+
+“The part to a T.”
+
+“Well--take these into the fort for me, will you?” His brother caught
+the bundle of discarded European clothes and tucked them under his arm.
+“Now, re-member, old man! This is the biggest show there has ever been!
+We've got to hold the Khyber, and we can't do it by riding pell-mell
+into the first trap set for us! We must smash when the fighting
+starts--but we mayn't miss! We mayn't run past the mark! Be a coward,
+if that's the name you care to give it. You needn't tell me you've got
+orders to hunt skirmishers to a standstill, because I know better. I
+know you've just had your wig pulled for laming two horses!”
+
+“How d'you know that?”
+
+“Never mind! I've been seconded to your crowd. I'm your senior, and I'm
+giving you orders. This show isn't sport, but the real red thing, and
+I want to count on you to fight like a trained man, not like a
+natural-born fool. I want to know you're holding Ali Masjid like Fabius
+held Rome, by being slow and wily, just for the sake of the comfortable
+feeling it will give me when I'm alone among the 'Hills.' Hit hard when
+you have to, but for God's sake, old man, ware traps!”
+
+“All right,” said his brother.
+
+“Then good-by, old man!”
+
+“Good-by, Athelstan!”
+
+They stood facing and shook hands. Where had been a man and his
+reflection in the mist, there now seemed to be the same man and a
+native. Athelstan King had changed his very nature with his clothes.
+He stood like a native--moved like one; even his voice was changed, as
+if--like the actor who dyed himself all over to act Othello--he could do
+nothing by halves.
+
+“I'm going to try to get in without my men seeing me!” said the younger.
+
+“If they do see you, they'll shoot!”
+
+“Yes, and miss! Trust a Khyber jezailchi not to hit much in the dark!
+It'll do 'em good either way. I'll have time to give 'em the password
+before they fire a second volley. They're not really dangerous till the
+third one. Good-by!”
+
+“By, Charles!”
+
+Officers in that force are not chosen for their clumsiness, or inability
+to move silently by night. His foot-steps died in the mist almost as
+quickly as his shadow. Before he had been gone a minute the Pass was
+silent as death again, and though Athelstan listened with trained ears,
+the only sound he could detect was of a jackal cracking a bone fifty or
+sixty yards away.
+
+He repacked the loads, putting everything back carefully into the big
+leather envelopes and locking the empty hand-bag, after throwing in a
+few stones for Ismail's benefit. Then he went to sit in the moonlight,
+with his back to a great rock and waited there cross-legged to give his
+brother time to make good a retreat through the mist. When there was
+no more doubt that his own men, at all events, had failed to detect the
+lieutenant, he put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.
+
+Almost at once he heard sandals come pattering from both directions. As
+they emerged out of the mist he sat silent and still. It was Darya Khan
+who came first and stood gaping at him, but Ismail was a very close
+second, and the other three were only a little behind. For full two
+minutes after the man with the sore stomach had come they all stood
+holding one another's arms, astonished. Then--
+
+“Where is he?” asked Ismail.
+
+“Who?” said King, the hakim.
+
+“Our sahib--King sahib--where is he?”
+
+“Gone!”
+
+Even his voice was so completely changed that men who had been reared
+amid mutual suspicion could not recognize it.
+
+“But there are his loads! There is his mule!”
+
+“Here is his bag!” said Ismail, pouncing on it, picking it up and
+shaking it. “It rattles not as formerly! There is more in it than there
+was!”
+
+“His two horses and the mule are here,” said Darya Khan.
+
+“Did I say he took them with him?” asked the hakim, who sat still with
+his back to a rock. “He went because I came! He left me here in charge!
+Should he not leave the wherewithal to make me comfortable, since I must
+do his work? Hah! What do I see? A man bent nearly double? That means a
+belly ache! Who should have a belly ache when I have potions, lotions,
+balms to heal all ills, magic charms and talismans, big and little
+pills--and at such a little price! So small a price! Show me the belly
+and pay your money! Forget not the money, for nothing is free except
+air, water and the Word of God! I have paid money for water before now,
+and where is the mullah who will not take a fee? Nay, only air costs
+nothing! For a rupee, then--for one rupee I will heal the sore belly and
+forget to be ashamed for taking such a little fee!”
+
+“Whither went the sahib? Nay--show us proof!” objected Darya Khan; and
+Ismail stood back a pace to scratch his flowing beard and think.
+
+“The sahib left this with me!” said King, and held up his wrist. The
+gold bracelet Rewa Gunga had given him gleamed in the pale moonlight.
+
+“May God be with thee!” boomed all five men together.
+
+King jumped to his feet so suddenly that all five gave way in front of
+him, and Darya Khan brought his rifle to the port.
+
+“Hast thou never seen me before?” he demanded, seizing Ismail by the
+shoulders and staring straight into his eyes.
+
+“Nay, I never saw thee!”
+
+“Look again!”
+
+He turned his head, to show his face in profile.
+
+“Nay, I never saw thee!”
+
+“Thou, then! Thou with the belly! Thou! Thou!”
+
+They all denied ever having seen him.
+
+So he stepped back until the moon shone full in his face and pulled off
+his turban, changing his expression at the same time.
+
+“Now look!”
+
+“Ma'uzbillah! (May God protect us!)”
+
+“Now ye know me?”
+
+“Hee-yee-yee!” yelled Ismail, hugging himself by the elbows and
+beginning to dance from side to side. “Hee-yee-yee! What said I? Said
+I not so? Said I not this is a different man? Said I not this is a
+good one--a man of unexpected things? Said I not there was magic in the
+leather bag? I shook it often, and the magic grew! Hee-yee-yee! Look at
+him! See such cunning! Feel him! Smell of him! He is a good one--good!”
+
+Three of the others stood and grinned, now that their first shock of
+surprise had died away. The fourth man poked among the packs. There was
+little to see except gleaming teeth and the whites of eyes, set in hairy
+faces in the mist. But Ismail danced all by himself among the stones of
+Khyber road and he looked like a bearded ghoul out for an airing.
+
+“Hee-yee-yee! She smelt out a good one! Hee-yee-yee! This is a man after
+my heart! Hee-yee-yee! God preserve me! God preserve me to see the end
+of this! This one will show sport! Oh-yee-yee-yee!”
+
+Suddenly he closed with King and hugged him until the stout ribs cracked
+and bent inward and King sobbed for breath among the strands of the
+Afridi's beard. He had to use knuckles and knees and feet to win
+freedom, and though he used them with all his might and hurt the old
+savage fiercely, he made no impression on his good will.
+
+“After my own heart, thou art! Spirit of a cunning one! Worker of
+spells! Allah! That was a good day when she bade me wait for thee!”
+
+King sat down again, panting. He wanted time to get his breath back and
+a little of the ache out of his ribs, but he did not care to waste any
+more minutes, and his eyes watched the faces of the other four men. He
+saw them slowly waken to understanding of what Ismail meant by “worker
+of spells” and “magic in the bag” and knew that he had even greater hold
+on them now than Yasmini's bracelet gave him.
+
+“Ma'uzbillah!” they murmured as Ismail's meaning dawned and they
+recognized a magician in their midst. “May God protect us!”
+
+“May God protect me! I have need of it!” said King. “What shall my new
+name be? Give ye me a name!”
+
+“Nay, choose thou!” urged Ismail, drawing nearer. “We have seen one
+miracle; now let us hear another!”
+
+“Very well. Khan is a title of respect. Since I wish for respect, I
+will call myself Khan. Name me a village the first name you can think
+of--quick!”
+
+“Kurram,” said Ismail, at a hazard.
+
+“Kurram is good. Kurram I am! Kurram Khan is my name henceforward!
+Kurram Khan the dakitar!”
+
+“But where is the sahib who came from the fort to talk?” asked the man
+whose stomach ached yet from Ismail and Darya Khan's attentions to it.
+
+“Gone!” announced King. “He went with the other one!”
+
+“Went whither? Did any see him go?”
+
+“Is that thy affair?” asked King, and the man collapsed. It is not
+considered wise to the north of Jamrud to argue with a wizard, or even
+with a man who only claims to be one. This was a man who had changed his
+very nature almost under their eyes.
+
+“Even his other clothes have gone!” murmured one man, he who had poked
+about among the packs.
+
+“And now, Ismail, Darya Khan, ye two dunder-heads!--ye bellies without
+brains!--when was there ever a dakitar--a hakim, who had not two
+assistants at the least? Have ye never seen, ye blinder-than-bats--how
+one man holds a patient while his boils are lanced, and yet another
+makes the hot iron ready?”
+
+“Aye! Aye!”
+
+They had both seen that often.
+
+“Then, what are ye?”
+
+They gaped at him. Were they to work wonders too? Were they to be part
+and parcel of the miracle? Watching them, King saw understanding dawn
+behind Ismail's eyes and knew he was winning more than a mere admirer.
+He knew it might be days yet, might be weeks before the truth was out,
+but it seemed to him that Ismail was at heart his friend. And there are
+no friendships stronger than those formed in the Khyber and beyond--no
+more loyal partnerships. The “Hills” are the home of contrasts,
+of blood-feuds that last until the last-but-one man dies, and of
+friendships that no crime or need or slander can efface. If the feuds
+are to be avoided like the devil, the friendships are worth having.
+
+“There is another thing ye might do,” he suggested, “if ye two grown men
+are afraid to see a boil slit open. Always there are timid patients who
+hang back and refuse to drink the medicines. There should be one or two
+among the crowd who will come forward and swallow the draughts eagerly,
+in proof that no harm results. Be ye two they!”
+
+Ismail spat savagely.
+
+“Nay! Bismillah! Nay, nay! I will hold them who have boils, sitting
+firmly on their bellies--so--or between their shoulders--thus--when
+the boils are behind! Nay, I will drink no draughts! I am a man, not a
+cess-pool!”
+
+“And I will study how to heat hot irons!” said Darya Khan, with grim
+conviction. “It is likely that, having worked for a blacksmith once, I
+may learn quickly! Phaughghgh! I have tasted physic! I have drunk Apsin
+Saats! (Epsom Salts.)”
+
+He spat, too, in a very fury of reminiscence.
+
+“Good!” said King. “Henceforward, then, I am Kurram Khan, the dakitar,
+and ye two are my assistants, Ismail to hold the men with boils, and
+Darya Khan to heat the irons--both of ye to be my men and support me
+with words when need be!”
+
+“Aye!” said Ismail, quick to think of details, “and these others shall
+be the tasters! They have big bellies, that will hold many potions
+without crowding. Let them swallow a little of each medicine in the
+chest now, for the sake of practise! Let them learn not to make a wry
+face when the taste of cess-pools rests on the tongue--”
+
+“Aye, and the breath comes sobbing through the nose!” said Darya Khan,
+remembering fragments of an adventurous career. “Let them learn to drink
+Apsin Saats without coughing!”
+
+“We will not drink the medicines!” announced the man who had a stomach
+ache. “Nay, nay!”
+
+But Ismail hit him with the back of his hand in the stomach again and
+danced away, hugging himself and shouting “Hee-yee-yee!” until the
+jackals joined him in discontented chorus and the Khyber Pass became
+full of weird howling. Then suddenly the old Afridi thought of something
+else and came back to thrust his face close to King's.
+
+“Why be a Rangar? Why be a Rajput, sahib? She loves us Hillmen better!”
+
+“Do I look like a Hillman of the 'Hills'?” asked King.
+
+“Nay, not now. But he who can work one miracle can work another. Change
+thy skin once more and be a true Hillman!”
+
+“Aye!” King laughed. “And fall heir to a blood-feud with every second
+man I chance upon! A Hill-man is cousin to a hundred others, and what
+say they in the 'Hills'?--'to hate like cousins,' eh? All cousins are
+at war. As a Rangar I have left my cousins down in India. Better be
+a converted Hindu and be despised by some than have cousins in the
+'Hills'! Besides--do I speak like a Hillman?”
+
+“Aye! Never an Afridi spake his own tongue better!”
+
+“Yet--does a Hillman slip? Would a Hillman use Punjabi words in a
+careless moment?”'
+
+“God forbid!”
+
+“Therefore, thou dunderhead, I will be a Rangar Rajput,--a stranger in
+a strange land, traveling by her favor to visit her in Khinjan!
+Thus, should I happen to make mistakes in speech or action, it may be
+overlooked, and each man will unwittingly be my advocate, explaining
+away my errors to himself and others instead of my enemy denouncing me
+to all and sundry! Is that clear, thou oaf?”
+
+“Aye! Thou art more cunning than any man I ever met!”
+
+The great Afridi began to rub the tips of his fingers through his
+straggly beard in a way that might mean anything, and King seemed to
+draw considerable satisfaction from it, as if it were a sign language
+that he understood. More than any one thing in the world just then
+he needed a friend, and he certainly did not propose to refuse such a
+useful one.
+
+“And,” he added, as if it were an afterthought, instead of his chief
+reason, “if her special man Rewa Gunga is a Rangar, and is known as a
+Rangar through out the 'Hills,' shall I not the more likely win favor
+by being a Rangar too? If I wear her bracelet and at the same time am a
+Rangar, who will not trust me?”
+
+“True! Thou art a magician!”
+
+“True!” agreed Ismail.
+
+But the moon was getting low and Khyber would be dark again in half an
+hour, for the great crags in the distance to either hand shut off more
+light than do the Khyber walls. The mist, too, was growing thicker. It
+was time to make a move.
+
+King rose. “Pack the mule and bring my horse!” he ordered and they
+hurried to obey with alacrity born of new respect, Darya Khan attending
+to the trimming of the mule's load in person instead of snarling at
+another man. It was a very different little escort from the one that
+had come thus far. Like King himself, it had changed its very nature in
+fifteen minutes!
+
+They brought the horse, and King laughed at them, calling the
+idiots--men without eyes.
+
+“The saddle?” Ismail suggested. “It is a government arrficer's saddle.”
+
+“Stolen!” said King, and they nodded. “Stolen along with the horse!”
+
+“Then the bridle?”
+
+“Stolen too, ye men without eyes! Ye insects! A stolen horse and saddle
+and bridle, are they not a passport of gentility this side of the
+border?”
+
+“Aye!”
+
+“I am Kurram Khan, the dakitar, but who in the 'Hills' would believe it?
+Look now--look ye and tell me what is wrong?”
+
+He pointed to the horse, and they stood in a row and stared.
+
+“Shorten those stirrups, then, six holes at the least! Men will laugh at
+me if I ride like a British arrficer!”
+
+“Aye!” said Ismail, hurrying to obey.
+
+“Aye! Aye! Aye!” agreed the others.
+
+“Now,” he said, gathering the reins and swinging into the saddle, “who
+knows the way to Khinjan?”
+
+“Which of us does not!”
+
+“Ye all know it? Then ye all are border thieves and worse! No honest man
+knows that road! Lead on, Darya Khan, thou Lord of Rivers! Do thy duty
+as badragga and beware lest we get our knees wet at the fords! Ismail,
+you march next. Now I. You other two and the mule follow me. Let the man
+with the belly ache ride last on the other horse. So! Forward march!”
+
+So Darya Khan led the way with his rifle, and King's face glowed in
+cigarette light not very far behind him as he legged his horse up the
+narrow track that led northward out of the Khyber bed.
+
+It would be a long time before he would dare smoke a cigar again, and
+his supply of cigarettes was destined to dwindle down to nothing before
+that day. But he did not seem to mind.
+
+“Cheloh!” he called. “Forward, men of the mountains! Kuch dar nahin
+hai!”
+
+“Thy mother and the spirit of a fight were one!” swore Ismail just in
+front of him, stepping out like a boy going to a picnic. “She will love
+thee! Allah! She will love thee! Allah! Allah!”
+
+The thought seemed to appal him. For hours after that he climbed ahead
+in silence.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+
+
+     Dear is the swagger that takes a man in
+             Helmeted, clattering, proud.
+     Sweet are the honors the arrogant win,
+             Hot from the breath of a crowd.
+     Precious the spirit that never will bend--
+             Hot challenge for insolent stare!
+     But--talk when you've tried it!--to win in the end,
+     Go ahsti!*  Be meek!  And beware!
+
+     [* Slowly.]
+
+
+Even with the man with the stomach ache mounted on the spare horse for
+the sake of extra speed (and he was not suffering one-fifth so much as
+he pretended); with Ismail to urge, and King to coax, and the fear of
+mountain death on every side of them, they were the part of a night and
+a day and a night and a part of another day in reaching Khinjan.
+
+Darya Khan, with the rifle held in both hands, led the way swiftly,
+but warily; and the last man's eyes looked ever backward, for many a
+sneaking enemy might have seen them and have judged a stern chase worth
+while.
+
+In the “Hills” the hunter has all the best of it, and the hunted needs
+must run. The accepted rule is to stalk one's enemy relentlessly and get
+him first. King happened to be hunting, although not for human life, and
+he felt bold, but the men with him dreaded each upstanding crag, that
+might conceal a rifleman. Armed men behind corners mean only one thing
+in the “Hills.”
+
+The animals grew weary to the verge of dropping, for the “road” had been
+made for the most part by mountain freshets, and where that was not the
+case it was imaginary altogether. They traveled upward, along ledges
+that were age-worn in the limestone--downward where the “hell-stones”
+ slid from under them to almost bottomless ravines, and a false step
+would have been instant death--up again between big edged boulders, that
+nipped the mule's pack and let the mule between--past many and many a
+lonely cairn that hid the bones of a murdered man (buried to keep his
+ghost from making trouble)--ever with a tortured ridge of rock for
+sky-line and generally leaning against a wind, that chilled them to the
+bone, while the fierce sun burned them.
+
+At night and at noon they slept fitfully at the chance-met shrine of
+some holy man. The “Hills” are full of them, marked by fluttering rags
+that can be seen for miles away; and though the Quran's meaning must be
+stretched to find excuse, the Hillmen are adept at stretching things and
+hold those shrines as sacred as the Book itself. Men who would almost
+rather cut throats than gamble regard them as sanctuaries.
+
+When a man says he is holy he can find few in the “Hills” to believe
+him; but when he dies or is tortured to death or shot, even the men who
+murdered him will come and revere his grave.
+
+Whole villages leave their preciousest possessions at a shrine before
+wandering in search of summer pasture. They find them safe on their
+return, although the “Hills” are the home of the lightest-fingered
+thieves on earth, who are prouder of villainy than of virtue. A man
+with a blood-feud, and his foe hard after him, may sleep in safety at
+a faquir's grave. His foe will wait within range, but he will not draw
+trigger until the grave is left behind.
+
+So a man may rest in temporary peace even on the road to Khinjan,
+although Khinjan and peace have nothing whatever in common.
+
+It was at such a shrine, surrounded by tattered rags tied to sticks,
+that fluttered in the wind three or four thousand feet above Khyber
+level, that King drew Ismail into conversation, and deftly forced on him
+the role of questioner.
+
+“How can'st thou see the Caves!” he asked, for King had hinted at his
+intention; and for answer King gave him a glimpse of the gold bracelet.
+
+“Aye! Well and good! But even she dare not disobey the rule. Khinjan was
+there before she came, and the rule was there from the beginning, when
+the first men found the Caves! Some--hundreds--have gained admission,
+lacking the right. But who ever saw them again? Allah! I, for one, would
+not chance it!”
+
+“Thou and I are two men!” answered King. “Allah gave thee qualities I
+lack. He gave thee the strength of a bull and a mountain goat in one,
+and her for a mistress. To me he gave other qualities. I shall see the
+Caves. I am not afraid.”
+
+“Aye! He gave thee other gifts indeed! But listen! How many Indian
+servants of the British Raj have set out to see the Caves? Many,
+many--aye, very many! Again and again the sirkar sent its loyal ones.
+Did any return? Not one! Some were crucified before they reached the
+place. One died slowly on the very rock whereon we sit, with his eyelids
+missing and his eyes turned to the sun! Some entered Khinjan, and the
+women of the place made sport with them. Those would rather have been
+crucified outside had they but known. Some, having got by Khinjan,
+entered the Caves. None ever came out again!”
+
+“Then, what is my case to thee?” King asked him “If I can not come out
+again and there is a secret then the secret will be kept, and what is
+the trouble?”
+
+“I love thee,” the Afridi answered simply. “Thou art a man after mine
+own heart. Turn! Go back before it is too late!”
+
+King shook his head.
+
+“Be warned!”
+
+Ismail reached out a hairy-backed hand that shook with half-suppressed
+emotion.
+
+“When we reach Khinjan, and I come within reach of her orders again,
+then I am her man, not thine!”
+
+King smiled, glancing again at the gold bracelet on his arm.
+
+“I look like her man, too!”
+
+“Thou!” Ismail's scorn was well feigned if it was not real. “Thou
+chicken running to the hand that will pluck thy breast-feathers!
+Listen! Abdurrahman--he of Khabul--and may Allah give his ugly bones no
+peace!--Abdurrahman of Khabul sought the secret of the Caves. He sent
+his men to set an ambush. They caught twenty coming out of Khinjan on
+a raid. The twenty were carried to Khabul and put to torture there.
+How many, think you, told the secret under torture? They died cursing
+Abdurrahman to his face and he died without the secret! May God
+recompense him with the fire that burns forever and scalding water and
+ashes to eat! May rats eat his bones!”
+
+“Had Abdurrahman this?” asked King, touching the bracelet.
+
+“Nay! He would have given one eye for it, but none would trade with him!
+He knew of it, but never saw it.”
+
+“I am more favored. I have it. It is hers, is it not?”
+
+“Does not she know the secret?”
+
+“She knows all that any man knows and more!”
+
+“Was she seen to slay a man in the teeth of written law?” asked King,
+and Ismail stared so hard at him that he laughed.
+
+“I was in Khinjan once before, my friend! I know the rule! I failed to
+reach the Caves that other time because I had no witnesses to swear they
+had seen me slay a man in the teeth of written law. I know!”
+
+“Who saw thee this time?” Ismail asked, and began to cackle with the
+cruel humor of the “Hills,” that sees amusement in a man's undoing, or
+in the destruction of his plans. His humor forced him to explain.
+
+“The price of an entrance has come of late to be the life of an English
+arrficer! Many an one the English have dubbed Ghazi, because he crossed
+the border and buried his knife in a man on church parade! They hang
+and burn them, knowing our Muslim law, that denies Heaven to him who is
+hanged and burned. Yet the man they miscall ghazi sought but the key to
+Khinjan Caves, with no thought at all about Heaven! Thou art a British
+arrficer. It may be they will let thee enter the Caves at her bidding.
+It may be, too, that they will keep thee in a cage there for some
+chief's son to try his knife on when the time comes to win admission!
+Listen--man o' my heart!--so strict is the rule that boys born in the
+Caves, when they come to manhood, must go and slay an Englishman and
+earn outlawry before they may come back; and lest they prove fearful and
+betray the secret, ten men follow each. They die by the hand of one or
+other of the ten unless they have slain their man within two weeks. So
+the secret has been kept more years than ten men can remember!” (That
+estimate was doubtless due to a respect for figures and bore no relation
+to the length of a human generation.)
+
+“Whom did she kill to gain admission?” King asked him unexpectedly.
+
+“Ask her!” said Ismail. “It is her business.”
+
+“And thou? Was the life of a British officer the price paid?”
+
+“Nay. I slew a mullah.”
+
+The calmness of the admission, and the satisfaction that its memory
+seemed to bring the owner made King laugh. He found lawless satisfaction
+for himself in that Ismail's blood-price should have been a priest, not
+one of his brother officers. A man does not follow King's profession for
+health, profit or sentiment's sake, but healthy sentiment remains. The
+loyalty that drives him, and is its own most great reward, makes him a
+man to the middle. He liked Ismail. He could not have liked him in the
+same way if he had known him guilty of English blood, which is only
+proof, of course, that sentiment and common justice are not one. But
+sentiment remains. Justice is an ideal.
+
+“Be warned and go back!” urged Ismail.
+
+“Come with me, then.”
+
+“Nay, I am her man. She waits for me!”
+
+“I imagine she waits for me!” laughed King. “Forward! We have rested in
+this place long enough!”
+
+So on they went, climbing and descending the naked ramparts that lead
+eastward and upward and northward to the Roof of Mother Earth--Ismail
+ever grumbling into his long beard, and King consumed by a fiercer
+enthusiasm than ever had yet burned in him,
+
+“Forward! Forward! Cast hounds forward! Forward in any event!” says
+Cocker. It is only regular generals in command of troops in the field
+who must keep their rear open for retreat. The Secret Service thinks
+only of the goal ahead.
+
+It was ten of a blazing forenoon, and the sun had heated up the rocks
+until it was pain to walk on them and agony to sit, when they topped the
+last escarpment and came in sight of Khinjan's walls, across a
+mile-wide rock ravine--Khinjan the unregenerate, that has no other human
+habitation within a march because none dare build.
+
+They stood on a ridge and leaned against the wind. Beneath them a path
+like a rope ladder descended in zigzags to the valley that is Khinjan's
+dry moat; it needed courage as well as imagination to believe that the
+animals could be guided down it.
+
+“Is there no other way?” asked King. He knew well of one other, but one
+does not tell all one knows in the “Hills,” and there might have been a
+third way.
+
+“None from this side,” said Ismail.
+
+“And on the other side?”
+
+“There is a rather better path--that by which the sirkar's troops once
+came--although it has been greatly obstructed since. It is two days'
+march from here to reach it. Be warned a last time, sahib--little
+hakim--be warned and go back!”
+
+“Thou bird of ill omen!” laughed King. “Must thou croak from every rock
+we rest on?”
+
+“If I were a bird I would fly away back with thee!” said Ismail.
+
+“Forward, since we can not fly--forward and downward!” King answered.
+“She must have crossed this valley. Therefore there are things worth
+while beyond! Forward!”
+
+The animals, weary to death anyhow, fell rather that walked down the
+track. The men sat and scrambled. And the heat rose up to meet them from
+the waterless ravine as if its floor were Tophet's lid and the devil
+busy under it, stoking.
+
+It was midday when at last they stood on bottom and swayed like men in a
+dream fingering their bruises and scarcely able for the heat haze to
+see the tangled mass of stone towers and mud-and-stone walls that faced
+them, a mile away. Nobody challenged them yet. Khinjan itself seemed
+dead, crackled in the heat.
+
+“Sahib, let us mount the hill again and wait for night and a cool
+breeze!” urged Darya Khan.
+
+Ismail clucked into his beard and spat to wet his lips.
+
+“This glare makes my eyes ache!” he grumbled.
+
+“Wait, sahib! Wait a while!” urged the others.
+
+“Forward!” ordered King. “This must be Tophet. Know ye not that none
+come out of Tophet by the way they entered in? Forward! The exit is
+beyond!”
+
+They staggered after him, sheltering their eyes and faces from the
+glare with turban-ends and odds and ends of clothing. The animals swayed
+behind them with hung heads and drooping ears, and neither man nor beast
+had sense enough left to have detected an ambush. They were more than
+half-way across the valley, hunting for shadow where none was to be
+found, when a shotted salute brought them up all-standing in a cluster.
+Six or eight nickel-coated bullets spattered on the rocks close by, and
+one so narrowly missed King that he could feel its wind.
+
+Up went all their hands together, and they held them so until they
+ached. Nothing whatever happened. Their arms ceased aching and grew
+numb.
+
+“Forward!” ordered King.
+
+After another quarter of a mile of stumbling among hot boulders, not
+one of which was big enough to afford cover, or shelter from the sun,
+another volley whistled over them. Their hands went up again, and this
+time King could see turbaned heads above a parapet in front. But nothing
+further happened.
+
+“Forward!” he ordered.
+
+They advanced another two hundred yards and a third volley rattled
+among the rocks on either hand, frightening one of the mules so that it
+stumbled and fell and had to be helped up again. When that was done,
+and the mule stood trembling, they all faced the wall. But they were too
+weary to hold their hands up any more. Thirst had begun to exercise its
+sway. One of the men was half delirious.
+
+“Who are ye?” howled a human being, whose voice was so like a wolf's
+that the words at first had no meaning. He peered over the parapet,
+a hundred feet above, with his head so swathed in dirty linen that he
+looked like a bandaged corpse.
+
+“What will ye? Who comes uninvited into Khinjan?”
+
+King bethought him of Yasmini's talisman. He, held it up, and the gold
+band glinted in the sun. Yet, although a Hillman's eyes are keener than
+an eagle's, he did not believe the thing could be recognized at that
+angle, and from that distance. Another thought suggested itself to him.
+He turned his head and caught Ismail in the act of signaling with both
+hands.
+
+“Ye may come!” howled the watchman on the parapet, disappearing
+instantly.
+
+King trembled--perhaps as a racehorse trembles at the starting gate,
+though he was weary enough to tremble from fatigue. The “Hills,” that
+numb the hearts of many men, had not cowed him, for he loved them and
+in love there is no fear. Heat and cold and hunger were all in the day's
+work; thirst was an incident; and the whistle of lead in the wind had
+never meant more to him than work ahead to do.
+
+But a greyhound trembles in the leash. A boiler, trembles when word goes
+down the speaking-tube from the bridge for “all she's got.” And so
+the mild-looking hakim Kurram Khan, walking gingerly across hot rocks,
+donning cheap, imitation shell-rimmed spectacles to help him look the
+part, trembled even more than the leg-weary horse he led.
+
+But that passed. He was all in hand when he led his men up over a rough
+stone causeway to a door in the bottom of a high battlemented wall and
+waited for somebody to open it.
+
+The great teak door looked as if it had been stolen from some Hindu
+temple, and he wondered how and when they could have brought it there
+across those savage intervening miles. With its six-inch teak planks
+and bronze bolts its weight must be guessed at in tons--yet a horse can
+hardly carry a man along any of the trails that lead to Khinjan!
+
+The wood bore the marks of siege and fracture and repair. The walls were
+new-built, of age-old stone. The last expedition out of India had
+leveled every bit of those defenses flat with the valley, but Khinjan's
+devils had reerected them, as ants rebuild a rifled nest.
+
+The door was swung open after a time, pulled by a rope, manipulated from
+above by unseen hands. Inside was another blind wall, twenty feet behind
+the first. To the right a low barricade blocked the passage and provided
+a safe vantage point from which it could be swept by a hail of lead;
+but to the left a path ran unobstructed for more than a hundred yards
+between the walls, to where the way was blocked by another teak door,
+set in unscalable black rock. High above the door was a ledge of rock
+that crossed like a bridge from wall to wall, with a parapet of stone
+built upon it, pierced for rifle-fire.
+
+As they approached this second door a Rangar turban, not unlike King's
+own, appeared above the parapet on the ledge and a voice he recognized
+hailed him good-humoredly.
+
+“Salaam aleikoum!”
+
+“And upon thee be peace!” King answered in the Pashtu tongue, for the
+“Hills” are polite, whatever the other principles.
+
+Rewa Gunga's face beamed down on him, wreathed in smiles that seemed to
+include mockery as well as triumph. Looking up at him at an angle that
+made his neck ache and dazzled his eyes, King could not be sure, but it
+seemed to him that the smile said, “Here you are, my man, and aren't you
+in for it?” He more than half suspected he was intended to understand
+that. But the Rangar's conversation took another line.
+
+“By jove!” he chuckled. “She expected you. She guessed you are a hound
+who can hunt well on a dry scent, and she dared bet you will come in
+spite of all odds! But she didn't expect you in Rangar dress! No, by
+jove! You jolly well will take the wind out of her sails!”
+
+King made no answer. For one thing, the word “hound,” even in English,
+is not essentially a compliment. But he had a better reason than that.
+
+“Did you find the way easily?” the Rangar asked but King kept silence.
+
+“Is he parched? Have they cut his tongue out on the road?”
+
+That question was in Pashtu, directed at Ismail and the others, but King
+answered it.
+
+“Oh, as for that,” he said, salaaming again in the fastidious manner
+of a native gentleman, “I know no other tongue than Pashtu and my own
+Rajasthani. My name is Kurram Khan. I ask admittance.”
+
+He held up his wrist to show the gold bracelet, and high over his head
+the Rangar laughed like a bell.
+
+“Shabash!” he laughed. “Well done! Enter, Kurram Khan, and be welcome,
+thou and thy men. Be welcome in her name!”
+
+Somebody pulled a rope and the door yawned wide, giving on a kind of
+courtyard whose high walls allowed no view of anything but hot blue sky.
+King hurried under the arch and looked up, but on the courtyard side of
+the door the wall rose sheer and blank, and there was no sign of window
+or stairs, or of any means of reaching the ledge from which the Rangar
+had addressed him. What he did see, as he faced that way, was that
+each of his men salaamed low and covered his face with both hands as he
+entered.
+
+“Whom do ye salute?” he asked.
+
+Ismail stared back at him almost insolently, as one who would rebuke a
+fool.
+
+“Is this not her nest these days?” he answered. “It is well to bow low.
+She is not as other women. She is she! See yonder!”
+
+Through a gap under an arch in a far corner of the courtyard came a
+one-eyed, lean-looking villain in Afridi dress who leaned on a long gun
+and stared at them under his hand. After a leisurely consideration of
+them he rubbed his nose slowly with one finger, spat contemptuously, and
+then used the finger to beckon them, crooking it queerly and turning on
+his heel. He did not say one word.
+
+King led the way after him on foot, for even in the “Hills” where
+cruelty is a virtue, a man may be excused, on economic grounds, for
+showing mercy to his beast. His men tugged the weary animals along
+behind him, through the gap under the arch and along an almost
+interminable, smelly maze of alleys whose sides were the walls of square
+stone towers, or sometimes of mud-and-stone-walled compounds, and here
+and there of sheer, slab-sided cliff.
+
+At intervals they came to bolted narrow doors, that probably led up to
+overhead defenses. Not fifty yards of any alley was straight; not a yard
+but what was commanded from overhead. Khinjan had been rebuilt since its
+last destruction by some expert who knew all about street fighting. Like
+Old Jerusalem, the place could have contained a civil war of a hundred
+factions, and still have opposed stout resistance to an outside army.
+
+Alley gave on to courtyard, and filthy square to alley, until
+unexpectedly at last a seemingly blind passage turned sharply and opened
+on a straight street, of fair width, and more than half a mile long. It
+is marked “Street of the Dwellings” on the secret army maps, and it has
+been burned so often by Khinjan rioters, as well as by expeditions out
+of India, that a man who goes on a long journey never expects to find it
+the same on his return.
+
+It was lined on either hand with motley dwellings, out of which a
+motlier crowd of people swarmed to stare at King and his men. There were
+houses built of stolen corrugated iron--that cursed, hot, hideous stuff
+that the West has inflicted on an all-too-willing East; others of
+wood--of stone--of mud--of mats--of skins--even of tent-cloth. Most of
+them were filthy. A row of kites sat on the roof of one, and in the
+gutter near it three gorged vultures sat on the remains of a mule.
+Scarcely a house was fit to be defended, for Khinjan's fighting men all
+possess towers, that are plastered about the overfrowning mountain like
+wasp nests on a wall. These were the sweepers, the traders, the loose
+women, the mere penniless and the more or less useful men--not Khinjan's
+inner guard by any means.
+
+There were Hindus--sycophants, keepers of accounts and writers to
+the chiefs (since literacy is at premium in these parts). In proof of
+Khinjan's catholic taste and indiscriminate villainy, there were
+women of nearly every Indian breed and caste, many of them stolen into
+shameful slavery, but some of them there from choice. And there were
+little children--little naked brats with round drum tummies, who
+squealed and shrilled and stared with bold eyes; some of them were
+pretending to be bandits on their own account already, and one flung a
+stone that missed King by an inch. The stone fell in the gutter on the
+far side and, started a fight among the mangy street curs, which
+proved a diversion and probably saved King's party from more accurate
+attentions.
+
+Perhaps a thousand souls came out to watch, all told. Not an eye of them
+all missed the government marks on King's trappings, or the government
+brand on the mules, and after a minute or two, when the procession was
+half-way down the street, a man reproved the child who had thrown
+a stone, and he was backed up by the others. They classified King
+correctly, exactly as he meant they should. As a hakim--a man of
+medicine--he could fill a long-felt want; but by the brand on his
+accouterments he walked an openly avowed robber, and that made him a
+brother in crime. Somebody cuffed the next child who picked up a stone.
+
+He knew the street of old, although it had changed perhaps a dozen times
+since he had seen it. It was a cul-de-sac, and at the end of it, just
+as on his previous visit, there stood a stone mosque, whose roof leaned
+back at a steep angle against the mountain-side. The fact that it was a
+mosque, and that it was the only building used as such in Khinjan,
+had saved it from being leveled to the ground by the last British
+expedition.
+
+It was a famous mosque in its way, for the bed-sheet of the Prophet is
+known to hang in it, preserved against the ravages of time and the touch
+of infidels by priceless Afghan rugs before and behind, so that it hangs
+like a great thin sandwich before the rear stone wall. King had seen
+it. Very vividly he recalled his almost exposure by a suspicious mullah,
+when he had crept nearer to examine it at close range. For the Secret
+Service must probe all things.
+
+There had been an attempt since his last visit to make the mosque's
+exterior look more in keeping with the building's use. It was cleaner.
+It had been smeared with whitewash. A platform had been built on the
+roof for the muezzin. But it still looked more like a fort than a place
+of worship.
+
+Toward it the one-eyed ruffian led the way, with the long,
+leisurely-seeming gait of a mountaineer. At the door, in the middle of
+the end of the street, he paused and struck on the lintel three times
+with his gun-butt. And that was a strange proceeding, to say the least,
+in a land where the mosque is public resting place for homeless ones,
+and all the “faithful” have a right to enter.
+
+A mullah, shaven like a mummy for some unaccountable reason--even his
+eyebrows and eyelashes had been removed--pushed his bare head through
+the door and blinked at them. There was some whispering and more
+staring, and at last the mullah turned his back.
+
+The door slammed. The one-eyed guide grounded his gun-butt on the
+stone, and the procession waited, watched by the crowd that had lost its
+interest sufficiently to talk and joke.
+
+In two minutes the mullah returned and threw a mat over the threshold.
+It turned out to be the end of a long narrow strip that he kicked and
+unrolled in front of him all across the floor of the mosque. After that
+it was not so astonishing that the horses and mules were allowed to
+enter.
+
+“Which proves I was right after all!” murmured King to himself.
+
+In a steel box at Simla is a memorandum, made after his former visit
+to the place, to the effect that the entrance into Khinjan Caves might
+possibly be inside the mosque. Nobody had believed it likely, and he
+had not more than half favored it himself; but it is good, even when
+the next step may lead into a death-trap, to see one's first opinions
+confirmed.
+
+He nodded to himself as the outer door slammed shut behind them, for
+that was another most unusual circumstance.
+
+A faint light shone through slit-like windows, changing darkness into
+gloom, and little more than vaguely hinting at the Prophet's bed-sheet.
+But for a section of white wall to either side of it, the relic might
+have seemed part of the shadows. The mullah stood with his back to it
+and beckoned King nearer. He approached until he could see the pattern
+on the covering rugs, and the pink rims round the mullah's lashless
+eyes.
+
+“What is thy desire?” the mullah asked--as a wolf might ask what a lamb
+wants.
+
+Supposing Yasmini to be jealous of invasion of her realm, King did not
+doubt she would be glad to have him break down at this point. Until he
+had actually gained access to her, nobody could reasonably charge her
+with his safety. If he had been done to death in the Khyber, the sirkar
+would have known it in a matter of hours. If he were killed here they
+might never know it.
+
+“Answer!” said the mullah. “What is thy desire?”
+
+“Audience with her!” he answered, and showed the gold bracelet on his
+wrist.
+
+The red eye-rims of the mullah blinked a time or two, and though he
+did not salute the bracelet, as others had invariably done, his manner
+underwent a perceptible change.
+
+“That is proof that she knows thee. What is thy name.”
+
+“Kurram Khan.”
+
+“And thy business?”
+
+“Hakim.”
+
+“We need thee in Khinjan Caves! But none enter who have not earned right
+to enter! There is but one key. Name it!”
+
+King drew in his breath. He had hoped Yasmini's talisman would prove to
+be key enough. The nails his left hand nearly pierced the palm, but he
+smiled pleasantly.
+
+“He who would enter must slay a man before witnesses in the teeth of
+written law!” he said.
+
+“And thou?”
+
+“I slew an Englishman!” The boast made his blood run cold, but his
+expression was one of sinful pride.
+
+“Whom? When? Where?”
+
+“Athelstan King--a British arrficer--sent on his way to these 'Hills' to
+spy!”
+
+It was like having spells cast on himself to order!
+
+“Where is his body?”
+
+“Ask the vultures! Ask the kites!”
+
+“And thy witnesses?”
+
+Hoping against hope, King turned and waved his hand. As he did so, being
+quick-eyed, he saw Ismail drive an elbow home into Darya Khan's ribs, an
+caught a quick interchange of whispers.
+
+“These men are all known to me,” said the mullah. “They all have right
+to enter here. They have right to testify. Did ye see him slay his man?”
+
+“Aye!” lied Ismail, prompt as friend can be.
+
+“Aye!” lied Darya Khan, fearful of Ismail's elbow.
+
+“Then, enter!” said the priest resignedly, as one admits a communicant
+against his better judgment.
+
+He turned his back on them so as to face the Prophet's bed-sheet and
+the rear wall, and in that minute a hairy hand gripped King's arm from
+behind, and Ismail's voice hissed hot-breathed in his ear.
+
+“Ready of tongue! Ready of wit! Who told thee I would lie to save thy
+skin? Be thy kismet as thy courage, then--but I am hers, not thy man!
+Hers, thou light of life--though God knows I love thee!”
+
+The mullah seized the Prophet's bed-sheet and its covering rugs in both
+hands, with about as much reverence as salesmen show for what they keep
+in stock. The whole lot slid to one side by means of noisy rings on a
+rod, and a wall lay bare, built of crudely cut but very well laid stone
+blocks. It appeared to reach unbroken across the whole width of the
+mosque's interior.
+
+On the floor lay a mallet, a peculiar thing of bronze, cast in one
+piece, handle and all. The mullah took it in his hand and struck the
+stone floor sharply once--then twice again--then three times--then a
+dozen times in quick succession. The floor rang hollow at that spot.
+
+After about a minute there came one answering hammer-stroke from beyond
+the wall. Then the mullah laid the mallet down and though King ached to
+pick it up and examine it he did not dare.
+
+Excitement now was probably the least of his emotions. It had been
+swallowed in interest. But in his guise of hakim he had to beware of
+that superficial western carelessness, that permits folk to acknowledge
+themselves frightened or excited or amused. His business was to attract
+as little attention to himself as possible; and to that end he folded
+his hands and looked reverent, as if entering some Mecca of his dreams.
+Through his horn-rimmed spectacles his eyes looked far-away and dreamy.
+But it would have been a mistake to suppose that a detail was escaping
+him.
+
+The irregular lines in the masonry began to be more pronounced. All at
+once the wall shook and they gaped by an inch or two, as happens when an
+earthquake has shaken buildings without bringing anything down. Then an
+irregular section of wall began to move quite smoothly away in front of
+him, leaving a gap through which eight men abreast could have marched.
+
+As it receded he observed that the lowest course stones was laid on
+a bronze foundation, that keyed in wide bronze grooves. There was oil
+enough in the grooves to have greased a ship's ways and there neither
+squeak nor tremor as the tons of masonry slid back.
+
+At the end of perhaps three minutes that section of the wall had become
+the fourth side of a twenty-foot-wide island that stood fair in the
+middle of a tunnel, splitting it in two to right and left. Judging by
+the angle of the two divisions they became one again before going very
+far.
+
+The mullah stood aside and motioned King to enter. But the one-eyed
+guide who had led them to the mosque thrust himself between Darya Khan
+and Ismail, pushed King aside and took the lead.
+
+“Nay!” he said, “I am responsible to her.”
+
+It was the first time he had spoken and he appeared to resent the waste
+of words.
+
+The tunnel that led to the left was pierced in twenty places in the roof
+for rifle-fire; a score of men with enough ammunition could have held
+it forever against an army. But the right-hand way looked undefended.
+Nevertheless, the guide led to the left, and King followed him, filled
+with curiosity.
+
+“Many have entered!” sang the lashless mullah in a sing-song chant.
+“More have sought to enter! Some who remained without were wisest! I
+count them! I keep count! Many went in! Not all came out again by this
+road!”
+
+“Then there is another road?” King wondered, but he held his tongue and
+followed the guide.
+
+It proved to be fifty yards through part natural, part hand-hewn, tunnel
+to the neck of the fork where the left--and right-hand passages became
+one again. He stopped at the fork and looked back, for none of his men
+was following.
+
+He caught the sound of scuffling of clattering hoofs, and grunts and
+shouted oaths--and started to run back, since even a native hakim may
+protect his own, should he care to, even in the “Hills.”
+
+For the sake of principle he chose the other passage, for Cocker says,
+“Look! Look! Look!” But the guide seized him by the arm from behind and
+swung him back again.
+
+“Not that way!” he growled. But he offered no explanation.
+
+In the “Hills” it is not good to ask “why” of strangers. It is good
+to be glad one was not knifed, and to be deferent until more suitable
+occasion. King started to run again, but this time along the same
+defended passage down which they had come. And now the guide made no
+objection but leaned on his long gun and waited.
+
+The charger proved to be making the trouble--the horse that King had
+exchanged with the jezailchi in the Khyber. The terrified brute was
+refusing to enter the passage, and all the men, including Ismail and the
+mullah, were shoving, or else tugging at the reins.
+
+At the moment King appeared the united strength of six men was beginning
+to prevail. The mullah let go the reins, and in that instant the horse
+saw King advance toward him out of the tunnel; so, after the manner of
+horses, he chose the other passage. King ran at full speed round
+the corner after him, remembering that the guide had admitted
+responsibility, and therefore that the chances were he would be rescued
+should he run into a trap.
+
+Suddenly, ten yards in the lead down the dark tunnel the horse threw his
+weight back with a clatter of sparks and screamed as only a horse can.
+After that there was neither sight nor sound of him.
+
+Creeping forward with both arms outstretched against the left-hand wall,
+he reached the spot where, the horse had been, and shuddered on the
+smooth dark edge of a hole that went the full width of the floor. There
+came whispering up out of it, and a dank wet smell, as if there were
+running water a mile away below. He could feel that a little air flowed
+downward into it. Twenty yards away on the far side the path resumed,
+but there was neither hand nor foothold on the smooth damp
+walls between. He went back to his men with a shiver between his
+shoulder-blades, and the mullah, standing in the gap of the mosque wall,
+blinked at him with lashless eyes.
+
+“Many have entered,” he chanted maliciously. “Some went out by a
+different road!”
+
+“Come!” Ismail growled at the other men, seizing the mule's bridle
+himself and leading to the left. “The ghosts will have a charger now for
+their captain to ride! Lead on, Hakim sahib!”
+
+“Come!” called the one-eyed guide from the neck of the fork ahead. And
+as they all pressed forward after King the hairless mullah gave a
+signal and the great stone door slid slowly into place. It was like a
+tombstone. It was as if the world that mortals know were a thing of the
+forgotten past and the underworld lay ahead.
+
+“Lead along, Charon!” King grinned. He needed some sort of pleasantry
+to steady his nerves. But even so he wondered what the nerves of India
+would be like if her millions knew of this place.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+
+
+
+     Oh, Abdul trod with a martial tread,
+     Swinging his scimiter's weight.
+     “I am overlord here,” he said,
+     “And he who wishes may chance his head,
+     “For my blade is long, and my arm is strong,
+     “And the goods of the world to the bold belong!”
+      So Abdul guarded the gate.
+
+     Many a head did Abdul cleave,
+     Turban and crown and chin,
+     For all the 'venturers sought to know
+     What it could be he guarded so.
+     And since none give but eke receive,
+     A thrust in his ribs made Abdul grieve
+     For good blood outpourin'.
+
+     His men wept, watching Abdul bleed
+     And life's light waning dim,
+     Till he cursed them. “Open the fort gate wide!
+     To saddle, and scour the countryside
+     For a leech!” he swore.  “God rot ye, ride!”
+      'Twas thus, in the guise of a friend in need,
+     His enemy came to him.
+
+
+The second gap closed up behind them and the tunnel began to echo
+weirdly. The mule was the next to be panic-stricken. The noise of
+his plunging increased the echoes a thousand times and multiplied his
+fright, until the poor brute collapsed into meek obedience at last.
+But the guide strode on unconcerned with his easy Hillman gait, neither
+deigning to glance back nor making any verbal comment.
+
+Over their heads, at irregular intervals, there were holes that if they
+led as King presumed into caves above, left not an inch of all the
+long passage that could not have been swept by rifle-fire. It was
+impregnable; for no artillery heavy enough to pound the mountain into
+pieces could ever be dragged within range. Whatever hiding place this
+entrance guarded could be held forever, given food and cartridges!
+
+The tunnel wound to right and left like a snake, growing lighter and
+lighter after each bend; and soon their own din began to be swallowed in
+a greater one that entered from the farther end. After two sharp turns
+they came out unexpectedly into the blaze of blue day, nearly stunned by
+light and sound. A road came up from below like that of an ocean in the
+grip of a typhoon.
+
+When his wits recovered from the shock, King struggled with a wild
+desire to yell, for before him, was what no servant of British India had
+ever seen and lived to tell about, and that is an experience more potent
+than unbroken rum.
+
+They had emerged from a round-mouthed tunnel--it looked already like a
+rabbit-hole, so huge was the cliff behind--on to a ledge of rock that
+formed a sort of road along one side of a mile-wide chasm. Above him, it
+seemed a mile up, was blue sky, to which limestone walls ran sheer, with
+scarcely a foothold that could be seen. Beneath, so deep that eyes
+could not guess how deep, yawned the stained gorge of the underworld,
+many-colored, smooth and wet.
+
+And out of a great, jagged slit in the side of the cliff, perhaps a
+thousand feet below them, there poured down into thunderous dimness a
+waterfall whose breadth seemed not less than half a mile. It spouted
+seventy or eighty yards before it began to curve, and its din was like
+the voice of all creation.
+
+Ismail came and stood by King in silence, taking his hand, as a little
+child might. Presently he stooped and picked up a stone and tossed it
+over.
+
+“Gone!” he said simply. “That down there is Earth's Drink!”
+
+“And this is the 'Heart of the Hills' men boast about?”
+
+“Nay! It is not!” snapped Ismail.
+
+“Then, where--”
+
+But the one-eyed guide beckoned impatiently, and King led the way after
+him, staring as hakim or prisoner or any man had right to do on first
+admission to such wonders. Not to have stared would have been to
+proclaim himself an idiot.
+
+The least of all the wonders was that the secret of the place should
+have been kept all down the centuries; for it was the hollow middle of
+a limestone mountain, that could neither be looked down into from
+above, because the heights were not scalable, nor guessed at from the
+conformation of the country. The river, that flowed out of rock and went
+plunging down into the chasm, must be snow from the Himalayan peaks, on
+its way to swell the sea. There was no other way to account for that;
+but that explanation did explain why at least one Indian river is no
+greater than it is.
+
+The road they followed was a fold in the natural rock, rising and
+falling and curving like a ribbon, but tending on the average downward.
+It looked to be about two miles to the point where it curved at the
+chasm's end and swept round and downward, to be lost in a fissure in the
+cliff.
+
+They soon began to pass the mouths of caves. Some were above the road,
+now and then at crazy heights above it, reached by artificial steps hewn
+out of the stone. Others were below, reached from the road by means of
+ladders, that trembled and swayed over the dizzying waterfall. Most of
+the caves were inhabited, for armed men and sullen women came to their
+entrances to stare.
+
+Ears grow accustomed to the sound of water sooner than to almost
+anything. It was not long before King's ears could catch the patter of
+his men's feet following, and the shod clink of the mule. He could hear
+when Ismail whispered:
+
+“Be brave, little hakim! She loves fearless men.”
+
+As the track descended caves became more numerous. In one there were
+horses, for as they passed there came a whiff of unclean stables, and
+the litter of fodder and dung was all about the entrance. The mouths
+of other caves were sealed, with great wax disks, strangely stamped,
+affixed to stout wooden doors. One cave smelt as if oil were stored in
+it, and King wondered whence the oil was brought--for the sirkar knows
+to a pint and an ounce what products travel up and down the Khyber.
+
+At last the guide halted, in the middle of a short steep slope where the
+path was less than six feet wide and a narrow cave mouth gave directly
+on to it.
+
+“Be content to rest here!” he said, pointing.
+
+“Thy cave?” asked King.
+
+“Nay. God's! I am the caretaker!”
+
+(The “Hills” are very pious and polite, between the acts of robbing and
+shedding blood.)
+
+“Allah, then, reward thee, brother!” answered King. “Allah give sight to
+thy blind eye! Allah give thee children! Allah give thee peace, and to
+all thy house!”
+
+The guide salaamed, half-mockingly, half-wondering at such eloquence,
+pausing in the passage to point into the side-caves that debouched to
+either hand. There was a niche of a place, where a man might lie on
+guard near the entrance; another cave in which horses could be stabled,
+with plenty of fodder piled up ready; another beyond that for servants
+and baggage, with a fireplace and cooking pots; and at the last at the
+rear of all a great cavern full of eerie gloom, that opened out from the
+end of the passage like a bottle at the end of a long neck.
+
+Peering about him into vastness, King became aware of frame beds, placed
+at intervals in a row, each with a mat beside it. And there were several
+brass basins and ewers for water. Also there were some little bronze
+lamps; the guide lit three of them, and King took up one to examine it.
+As he did so, involuntarily his hand almost went to his bosom, where the
+strange knife still reposed that he had taken from the would-be murderer
+in the train to Delhi.
+
+There was no gold on the lamp; but the handle by which he lifted it had
+been cast, the devils of the Himalayas only knew how many centuries ago,
+in the form of a woman dancing; her size, and her shape, and the art
+with which she had been fashioned, were the same as the handle of the
+knife.
+
+Watching him as a wolf eyes another one, the strange guide found his
+tongue.
+
+“How many such hast thou ever seen?” he asked.
+
+“None!” answered King, and the guide cackled at him, like a hen that has
+laid an egg.
+
+“There be many strange things in Khinjan, but few strangers!” he
+remarked; and then, as if that were enough for any man to say on any
+occasion, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the cavern. It was
+the last King ever saw of him. He followed him down the passage to the
+entrance and watched him until his back disappeared round the first
+bend, but the man never turned his head once. He did not even look over
+the edge of the road, down into the amazing waterfall, nor up to the
+round disk of sky.
+
+King turned back and looked into the other caves--saw the weary horse
+and mule fed, watered and bedded down--took note of the running water
+that rushed out of a rock fissure and gurgled out of sight down another
+one--examined the servants' cave and saw that they had been amply
+provided with blankets. There was nothing lacking that the most exacting
+traveler could have demanded at such a distance from civilization. There
+was more than the most exacting would have dared expect.
+
+“Why isn't it damp in here?” he wondered, returning to his own cave. And
+then he noticed long fissures in the cavern walls, and that the smoke
+from the lamps drifted toward them. He could not guess what made it
+do that, unless it were the suction of the enormous river hurrying
+underground; and then he remembered that at the entrance air had rushed
+downward into the hole down which the horse had disappeared, which
+partly confirmed his guess.
+
+“Ismail!” he shouted, and jumped at the revolver-crack--like echo of his
+voice.
+
+Ismail came running.
+
+“Make the men carry the mule's packs into this cave. You and Darya Khan
+stay here and help me open them. Remember, ye are both assistants of
+Kurram Khan, the hakim!”
+
+“They will laugh at us! They will laugh at us!” clucked Ismail, but he
+hurried to obey, while King wondered who would laugh.
+
+Within an hour a delegation came from no less a person than Yasmini
+herself, bearing her compliments, and hot food savory enough to make
+a brass idol's mouth water. By that time King had his sets of surgical
+instruments and drugs and bandages all laid out on one of the beds and
+covered from view by a blanket.
+
+It was only one more proof of the British army's everlasting luck that
+one of the men, who set the great brass dish of food on the floor
+near King, had a swollen cheek, and that he should touch the swelling
+clumsily, as he lifted his hand to shake back a lock of greasy hair.
+
+There followed an oath like flint struck on steel ten times in rapid
+succession.
+
+“Does it pain thee, brother?” asked Kurram Khan the hakim.
+
+“Are there devils in Tophet! Fire and my veins are one!”
+
+The man did not notice the eagerness beaming out of King's horn-rimmed
+spectacles, but Ismail did; it seemed to him time to prove his virtues
+as assistant.
+
+“This is the famous hakim Kurram Khan,” he boasted. “He can cure
+anything, and for a very little fee!”
+
+“Nay, for no fee at all in this case!” said King.
+
+The man looked incredulous, but King drew the covering from his row of
+instruments and bottles.
+
+“Take a chance!” he advised. “None but the brave wins anything!”
+
+The man sat down, as if he would argue the point at length, but Ismail
+and Darya Khan were new to the business and enthusiastic. They had him
+down, held tight on the floor to the huge amusement of the rest, before
+the man could even protest; and his howls of rage did him no good, for
+Ismail drove the hilt of a knife between his open jaws to keep them
+open.
+
+A very large proportion of King's stores consisted of morphia and
+cocaine. He injected enough cocaine to deaden the man's nerves, and
+allowed it time to work. Then he drew out three back teeth in quick
+succession, to make sure he had the right one.
+
+Ismail let the victim up, and Darya Khan gave him water in a brass
+cup. Utterly without pain for the first time for days, the man was as
+grateful as a wolf freed from a trap.
+
+“Allah reward thee, since the service was free!” he smirked.
+
+“Are there any others in pain in Khinjan?” King asked him.
+
+“Listen to him! What is Khinjan? Is there one man without a wound or a
+sore or a scar or a sickness?”
+
+“Then, tell them,” said King.
+
+The man laughed.
+
+“When I show my jaw, there will be a fight to be first! Make ready,
+hakim! I go!”
+
+He was true to his word and left the cave like a gust of wind, followed
+by the three who had come with him. King sat down to eat, but he had not
+finished his meal--he had made the last little heap of rice into a
+ball with his fingers, native style, and was mopping up the last of the
+curried gravy with it--when the advance guard of the lame and the halt
+and the sick made its appearance. The cave's entrance became jammed with
+them, and no riot ever made more noise.
+
+“Hakim! Ho, hakim! Where is the hakim who draws teeth? Where is the man
+who knows yunani?”
+
+Ten men burst down the passage all together, all clamoring, and one man
+wasted no time at all but began to tear away bloody bandages to show his
+wound. The hardest thing now was to get and keep some kind of order,
+and for ten minutes Ismail and Darya Khan labored, using threats where
+argument failed, and brute force when they dared. It was like beating
+mad hounds from off their worry. What established order at last was that
+King rolled up his sleeves and began, so that eagerness gave place to
+wonder.
+
+The “Hills” are not squeamish in any one particular; so that the fact
+that the cave became a shambles upset nobody. The surgeon's thrill that
+makes even half-amateurs oblivious of all but the work in hand,
+coupled with the desperate need of winning this first trick, made King
+horror-proof; and nobody waiting for the next turn was troubled because
+the man under the knife screamed a little or bled more than usual.
+
+When they died--and more than one did die--men carried them out and
+flung them over the precipice into the waterfall below.
+
+Ismail and Darya Khan became choosers of the victims. They seized a man,
+laid him on the bed, tore off his disgusting bandages and held their
+breath until the awful resulting stench had more or less dispersed. Then
+King would probe or lance or bandage as he saw fit, using anaesthetics
+when he must, but managing mostly without them.
+
+They almost flung money at him. Few of them asked what his fee would
+be. Those who had no money brought him shawls, and swords, and even
+clothing. Two or three brought old-fashioned fire-arms; but they were
+men who did not expect to live. And King accepted every gift without
+comment, because that was in keeping with the part he played. He tossed
+money and clothes and every other thing they gave him into a corner at
+the back of the cave, and nobody tried to steal them back, although a
+man suspected of honesty in that company would have been tortured to
+death as an heretic and would have had no sympathy.
+
+For hour after gruesome hour he toiled over wounds and sores such as
+only battles and evil living can produce, until men began to come at
+last with fresh wounds, all caused by bullets, wrapped in bandages on
+which the blood had caked but had not grown foul.
+
+“There has been fighting in the Khyber,” somebody informed him, and
+he stopped with lancet in mid-air to listen, scanning a hundred faces
+swiftly in the smoky lamplight. There were ten men who held lamps for
+him, one of them a newcomer, and it was he who spoke.
+
+“Fighting in the Khyber! Aye! We were a little lashkar, but we drove
+them back into their fort! Aye! we slew many!”
+
+“Not a jihad yet?” King asked, as if the world might be coming to an
+end. The words were startled out of him. Under other circumstances
+he would never have asked that question so directly; but he had
+lost reckoning of everything but these poor devils' dreadful need of
+doctoring, and he was like a man roused out of a dream. If a holy war
+had been proclaimed already, then he was engaged on a forlorn hope. But
+the man laughed at him.
+
+“Nay, not yet. Bull-with-a-beard holds back yet. This was a little
+fight. The jihad shall come later!”
+
+“And who is 'Bull-with-a-beard'?” King wondered; but he did not ask that
+question because his wits were awake again. It pays not to be in too
+much of a hurry to know things in the “Hills.”
+
+As it happened, he asked no more questions, for there came a shout
+at the cave entrance whose purport he did not catch, and within five
+minutes after that, without a word of explanation, the cave was left
+empty of all except his own five men. They carried away the men too sick
+to walk and vanished, snatching the last man away almost before King's
+fingers had finished tying the bandage on his wound.
+
+“Why is that?” he asked Ismail. “Why did they go? Who shouted?”
+
+“It is night,” Ismail answered. “It was time.”
+
+King stared about him. He had not realized until then that without aid
+of the lamps he could not see his own hand held out in front of him;
+his eyes had grown used to the gloom, like those of the surgeons in the
+sick-bays below the water line in Nelson's fleet.
+
+“But who shouted?”
+
+“Who knows? There is only one here who gives orders. We be many who
+obey,” said Ismail.
+
+“Whose men were the last ones?” King asked him, trying a new line.
+
+“Bull-with-a-beard's.”
+
+“And whose man art thou, Ismail?”
+
+The Afridi hesitated, and when he spoke at last there was not quite the
+same assurance in his voice as once there had been.
+
+“I am hers! Be thou hers, too! But it is night. Sleep against the toil
+tomorrow. There be many sick in Khinjan.”
+
+King made a little effort to clean the cave, but the task was hopeless.
+For one thing he was so weary that his very bones were water; for
+another, Ismail pretended to be equally tired, and when the suggestion
+that they should help was put to the others they claimed their izzat
+indignantly. Izzat and sharm (honor and shame) are the two scarcely
+distinguishable enemies of honest work, into whose teeth it takes both
+nerve and resolution to drive a Hillman at the best of times. Nerve King
+had, but his resolution was asleep. He was too tired to care.
+
+He appointed them to two-hour watches, to relieve one another until
+dawn, and flung himself on a clean bed. He was asleep before his head
+had met the pillow; and for all he knew to the contrary he dreamed of
+Yasmini all night long.
+
+It seemed to him that she came into the cave--she the woman of the faded
+photograph the general had given him in Peshawur--and that the cave
+became filled with the strange intoxicating scent that had first wooed
+his senses in her reception room in Delhi.
+
+He dreamed that she called him by name. First, “King sahib!” Then,
+“Kurram Khan!” And her voice was surprisingly familiar. But dreams are
+strange things.
+
+“He sleeps!” said the same voice presently. “It is good that he sleeps!”
+ And in his sleep he thought that a shadowy Ismail grunted an answer.
+
+After that he was very sure in his dream that it was good to sleep,
+although a voice he did not recognize and that he was quite sure was a
+dream-voice, kept whispering to him to wake up and protect himself.
+
+But the scent grew stronger, and he began to dream of cobras, that
+danced with a woman and struck at her so swiftly that she had to become
+two women in order to avoid them; and Rewa Gunga came and laughed at
+both and called them amateurs, so that the woman became enraged and drew
+a bronze-bladed dagger with a golden hilt.
+
+Then intelligible dreams ceased altogether, and he, slept like a dead
+man, but with a vague suggestion ever with him that Yasmini was not
+very far away, and that she was interested in him to a point that was
+actually embarrassing. It was like the ether-dream he once dreamt in a
+hospital.
+
+When he awoke at last it was after dawn, and light shone down the
+passage into his cave.
+
+“Ismail!” he shouted, for he was thirsty. But there was no answer.
+
+“Darya Khan!”
+
+Again there was no answer. He called each of the other men by name with
+the same result.
+
+He got up and realized then for the first time that he had not undressed
+himself the night before. His head felt heavy, and although he did not
+believe he had been drugged, there was a scent he half-recognized that
+permeated the cave, and even overcame the dreadful atmosphere that the
+sick of yesterday had left behind. He decided to go to the cave mouth,
+summon his men, who were no doubt sleeping as he had done, sniff the
+fresh air outside and come back to try the scent again; he would know
+then whether his nose were deceiving him.
+
+But there was no Ismail near the entrance--no Darya Khan--nor any of the
+other men. The horse was gone. So was the mule. So was the harness, and
+everything he had, except the drugs and instruments and the presents
+the sick had given him; he had noticed all those still lying about in
+confusion when he woke.
+
+“Ismail!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, thinking they might all be
+outside.
+
+He heard a man hawk and spit, close to the entrance, and went out to
+see. A man whom he had never seen before leaned on a magazine rifle and
+eyed him as a tiger eyes its prey.
+
+“No farther!” he growled, bringing his rifle to the port.
+
+“Why not?” King asked him.
+
+“Allah! When a camel dies in the Khyber do the kites ask why? Go in!”
+
+He thought then of Yasmini's bracelet, that always gained him at least
+civility from every man who saw it. He held up his left wrist and knew
+that instant why it felt uncomfortable. The bracelet has disappeared!
+
+He turned back into the cave to hunt for it, and the strange scent
+greeted him again. In spite of the surrounding stench of drugs and
+filthy wounds, there was no mistaking it. If it had been her special
+scent in Delhi, as Saunders swore it was, and her special scent on the
+note Darya Khan had carried down the Khyber, then it was hers now, and
+she had been in the cave.
+
+He hunted high and low and found no bracelet.
+
+His pistol was gone, too, and his cartridges, but not the dagger,
+wrapped in a handkerchief, under his shirt. The money, that his patients
+had brought him, lay on the floor untouched. It was an unusual robber
+who had robbed him.
+
+At least once in his life (or he were not human, but an angel) it dawns
+on a man that he has done the unforgivable. It dawns on most men oftener
+than once a week. So men learn sympathy.
+
+“I should have been awake to change the guard every two hours!” he
+admitted, sitting on the bed. “I wouldn't hesitate to shoot another man
+for that--or for less!”
+
+He let the thought sink in, until the very lees of shame tasted like
+ashes in his mouth. Then, being what he was,--and there are not very
+many men good enough to shoulder what lay ahead of him--he set the whole
+affair behind him as part of the past and looked forward.
+
+“Who's 'Bull-with-a-beard'?” he wondered. “Nobody interfered with me
+until I doctored his men. He's in opposition. That's a fair guess. Now,
+who in thunder--by the fat lord Harry--can 'Bull-with-a-beard' be?
+And why fighting in the Khyber so early as all this? And why does
+'Bull-with-a-beard,' whoever he is, hang back?”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+
+
+
+   Are jackals a tiger's friends because they flatter him and eat
+   his leavings?
+   Choose, ye with stripes and proud whiskers, choose between friend
+   and enemy.--Native Proverb
+
+
+They came and changed the guard two hours after dawn, to the
+accompaniment of a lot of hawking and spitting, orders growled through
+the mist, and the crash of rifle-butts grounding on the rock path. King
+went to the cave entrance, to look the new man over; but because he was
+in Khinjan, and Khinjan in the “Hills,” where indirectness is the key to
+information, he stood for a while at gaze, listening to the thunder of
+tumbling water and looking at the cliff-edge six feet away that was laid
+like a knife in the ascending mist.
+
+Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that the new man was a
+Mahsudi--no sweeter to look at and no less treacherous for the fact.
+Also, that he had boils all over the back of his neck. He was not likely
+to be better tempered because of that fact, either. But it is an ill
+wind that blows no good to the Secret Service.
+
+“There is an end to everything,” he remarked presently, addressing the
+world at large, or as much as he could see of it through the cave mouth.
+“A hill is so high, a pool so deep, a river so wide. How long, for
+instance, must thy watch be?”
+
+“What is that to thee?” the fellow growled.
+
+“There is an end to pain!” said King, adjusting his horn-rimmed
+spectacles. “I lanced a man's boils last night, and it hurt him, but he
+must be well to-day.”
+
+“Get in!” growled the guard. “She says it is sorcery! She says none are
+to let thee touch them!”
+
+Plainly, he was in no receptive mood; orders had been spat into his
+hairy ear too recently.
+
+“Get in!” he growled, lifting his rifle-butt as if to enforce the order.
+
+“I can heal boils!” said King, retiring into the cave. Then, from a
+safe distance down the passage, he added a word or two to sink in as the
+hours went by.
+
+“It is good to be able to bend the neck without pain and to rest easily
+at night! It is good not to flinch at another's touch. Boils are bad!
+Healing is easy and good!”
+
+Then, since a quarrel was the very last thing he was looking for, he
+retired into his own gloomy quarters at the rear, taking care to sit so
+that he could see and overhear what passed at the entrance. Among other
+things in the course of the day he noticed that the watch was changed
+every four hours and that there were only three men in the guard, for
+the same man was back again that evening.
+
+At intervals throughout the day Yasmini sent him food by silent
+messengers; so he ate, for “the thing to do,” says Cocker, “is the first
+that comes to hand, and the thing not to do is worry.” It is not easy to
+worry and eat heartily at one and the same time. Having eaten, he rolled
+up his sleeves and native-made cotton trousers and proceeded to clean
+the cave. After that he overhauled his stock of drugs and instruments,
+repacking them and making ready against opportunity.
+
+“As I told that heathen with a gun out there, there's an end to
+everything!” he reflected. “May this come soon!”
+
+When they changed the guard that afternoon he had grown weary of his
+own company and of fruitless speculation and was pacing up and down. The
+second guard proved even less communicative than the first, up to the
+point when, to lessen his ennui, King began to whistle. Because a Secret
+Service man must be consistent, the tune was not English, but a weird
+minor one to which the “Hills” have set their favorite love song (that
+is, all about hate in the concrete!).
+
+The echo of the waterfall within the cave was like the roaring in a
+shell held to the ear, but each time he came near the entrance the
+new guard could catch a few bars of the tune. After a little while the
+hook-nosed ruffian began to sing the words to it, in a voice like a
+forgotten dog's.
+
+So he stopped at the entrance and changed the tune. And the guard sang
+the words of the new tune, too. After that he came out into the light
+of day (direct sunlight was cut off by the huge height of the cliffs all
+around) and leaned in the entrance, smiling.
+
+“Allah preserve thee, brother!” he remarked. “Thine is a voice like a
+warrior's--bold and big! Thou art a true son of the Prophet!”
+
+“Aye!” said the fellow, “that I am! Allah preserve thee, for thou hast
+more need of it than I, although I guard thee just at present. Whistle
+me another one!”
+
+So King whistled the refrain of a song that boasts of an Afghan invasion
+of India, and of the loot that came of it, and the prisoners, and the
+women--particularly the women, mentioning more than a few of them by
+name, and their charms in detail. It was a song to warm the very cockles
+of a Hillman's heart. Nothing could have been better chosen for that
+setting, of a cave mouth half-way down the side of a gash in earth's
+wildest mountains, with the blue sky resting on a jagged rim a mile
+above.
+
+“Good!” said the bearded jailer. “Now begin again and I will sing!”
+
+He threw his head back and howled until the mountain walls rang with the
+song, and other men in far-off caves took it up and howled it back at
+him. When he left off singing at last, to drink from a water-bottle,
+that surely had been looted from a British soldier, King decided to be
+done with overtures and make the next move in the game.
+
+“Didst thou ever sing for her?” he asked, and the man turned round to
+stare at him as if he were mad, King saw then a blood-soaked bandage on
+the right of his neck, not very far from the jugular.
+
+“When she sings we are silent! When she is silent it is good to wait a
+while and see!” he answered.
+
+“Hah!” said King. “Was that wound got in the Khyber the other day?”
+
+“Nay. Here in Khinjan. I had my thumb in a man's eye, and the bastard
+bit me! May devils do worse to him where he has gone! I threw him into
+Earth's Drink!”
+
+“A good place for one's enemies!” laughed King.
+
+“Aye!”
+
+“A man told me last night,” said King, drawing on imagination without
+any compunction at all, “that the fight in the Khyber was because a
+jihad is launched aleady.”
+
+“That man lied!” said the guard, shifting position uneasily, as if
+afraid to talk too much.
+
+“So I told him!” answered King. “I told him there never will be another
+jihad.”'
+
+“Then art thou a greater liar than he!” the guard answered hotly. “There
+will be a jihad when she is ready, such an one as never yet was! India
+shall bleed for all the fat years she has lain unplundered! Not a throat
+of an unbeliever in the world shall be left un-slit! No jihad? Thou
+liar! Get in out of my sight!”
+
+So King retired into the cave, with something new to think about. Was
+she planning the jihad! Or pretending to plan one? Every once in a while
+the guard leaned far into the cave mouth and hurled adjectives at him,
+the mildest of which was a well of information. If his temper was the
+temper of the “Hills,” it was easy to read disappointment for a jihad
+that should have been already but had been postponed.
+
+When they changed the guard again the new man proved surly. There was
+no getting a word out of him. He showed dirty yellow teeth in a wolfish
+snarl, and his only answer was a lifted rifle and a crooked forefinger.
+King let him alone and paced the cave for hours.
+
+He was squatting on his bed-end in the dark, like a spectacled image of
+Buddha, when the first of the three men came on guard again and at last
+Ismail came for him holding a pitchy torch that filled the dim passage
+full of acrid smoke and made both of them cough. Ismail was red-eyed
+with it.
+
+“Come!” he growled. “Come, little hakim!” Then he turned on his heel at
+once, as if afraid of being twitted with desertion. He seemed to want to
+get outside, where he could keep out of range of words, yet not to wish
+to seem unfriendly.
+
+But King made no effort to speak to him, following in silence out on to
+the dark ledge above the waterfall and noticing that the guard with the
+boils was back again on duty. He grinned evilly out of a shadow as King
+passed.
+
+“Make an end!” he advised, spitting over the Cliff into thunderous
+darkness to illustrate the suggestion. “Jump, hakim, before a worse
+thing happens!”
+
+To add further point he kicked a loose stone over the edge, and the
+movement caused him to bend his neck and so inadvertently to hurt his
+boils. He cursed, and there was pity in King's voice when he spoke next.
+
+“Do they hurt thee?”
+
+“Aye, like the devil! Khinjan is a place of plagues!”
+
+“I could heal them,” King said, passing on, and the man stared hard.
+
+“Come!” boomed Ismail through the darkness, shaking the torch to make
+it burn better and beckoning impatiently, and King hurried after him,
+leaving behind a savage at the cave mouth who fingered his sores and
+wondered, muttering, leaning on a rifle, muttering and muttering again
+as if he had seen a new light.
+
+Instead of waiting for King to catch up, Ismail began to lead the way at
+great speed along a path that descended gradually until it curved round
+the end of the chasm and plunged into a tunnel where the darkness grew
+opaque. In the tunnel the torch's smoke cast weird shadows on walls and
+roof, and the fitful light only confused, so that Ismail slowed down and
+let him come up close.
+
+Then for thirty minutes he led swiftly down a crazy devil's stairway
+of uneven boulders, stopping to lend a hand at the worst places, but
+everlastingly urging him to hurry. They were both breathless, and King
+was bruised in a dozen places when they reached level going at least six
+or seven hundred feet below the cave from which they started.
+
+Then the hell-mouth gloom began to grow faintly luminous, and the
+waterfall's thunder burst on their ears from close at hand. They emerged
+into fresh wet air and a sea of sound, on a rock ledge like the one
+above. Ismail raised the torch and waved it. The fire and smoke wandered
+up, until they flattened on a moving opal dome, that prisoned all the
+noises in the world.
+
+“Earth's Drink!” he announced, waving the torch and then shutting his
+mouth tight, as if afraid to voice sacrilege.
+
+It was the river, million-colored in the torch-light, pouring from a
+half-mile-long slash in the cliff above them and plunging past them
+through the gloom toward the very middle of the world. Its width was a
+matter of memory, and its depth unguessable, for although dim moonlight
+filtered through it, he did not know where the moon was, nor how far
+such light could penetrate through moving water. Somewhere it met
+rock-bottom and boiled there, for a roar like the sea's came up from
+deeps unimaginable.
+
+He watched the overturning dome until his senses reeled. Then he crawled
+on hands and knees to the ledge's brink and tried to peer over. But
+Ismail dragged him back.
+
+“Come!” he howled; but in all that din his shout was like a whisper.
+
+“How deep is it?” King bellowed back.
+
+“Allah! Ask Him who made it!”
+
+The fear of the falls was on the Afridi, and he tugged at King's arm in
+a frenzy of impatience. Suddenly he let go and broke into a run. King
+trotted after him, afraid too, to look to right or left, lest the
+fear should make him throw himself over the brink. The thunder and the
+hugeness had their grip on him and had begun to numb his power to think
+and his will to be a man. Suddenly when they had run a hundred yards,
+Ismail turned sharp to the right into a tunnel that led straight back
+into the cliff and sloped uphill. As the din of the falls grew less
+behind him and his power to think returned, King calculated that they
+must be following the main direction of the river bed, but edging away
+gradually to the right of it. After ten minutes' hurrying uphill he
+guessed they must be level with the river, in a tunnel running nearly
+parallel.
+
+He proved to be right, for they came to a gap in the wall, and Ismail
+thrust the torch through it. The light shone on swift black water, and a
+wind rushed through the gap that nearly blew the torch out. It accounted
+altogether for the dryness of the rock and the fresh air in the tunnel.
+The river's weight seemed to suck a hurricane along with it--air enough
+for a million men to breathe.
+
+After that there was no more need to stop at intervals and beat the
+torch against the wall to make it burn brightly, for the wind fanned it
+until the flame was nearly white. Ismail kept looking back to bid King
+hurry and never paused once to rest.
+
+“Come!” he urged fiercely. “This leads to the 'Heart of the Hills'!” And
+after that King had to do his best to keep the Afridi's back in sight.
+
+They began after a time to hear voices and to see the smoky glare made
+by other torches. Then Ismail set the pace yet faster, and they became
+the last two of a procession of turbaned men, who tramped along a
+winding tunnel into a great mountain's womb. The sound of slippers
+clicking and rutching on the rock floor swelled and died and swelled
+again as the tunnel led from cavern into cavern.
+
+In one great cave they came to every man beat out his torch and tossed
+it on a heap. The heap was more than shoulder high, and three parts
+covered the floor of the cave. After that there was a ledge above the
+height of a man's head on either side of the tunnel, and along the ledge
+little oil-burning lamps were spaced at measured intervals. They looked
+ancient enough to have been there when the mountain itself was born,
+and although all the brass ones suggested Indian and Hindu origin, there
+were others among them of earthenware that looked like plunder from
+ancient Greece.
+
+It was like a transposition of epochs. King felt already as if the
+twentieth century had never existed, just as he seemed to have left life
+behind for good and all when the mosque door had closed on him.
+
+A quarter of a mile farther along the tunnel opened into another, yet
+greater cave, and there every man kicked off his slippers, without
+seeming to trouble how they lay; they littered the floor unarranged and
+uncared for, looking like the cast-off wing-cases of gigantic beetles.
+
+After that cave there were two sharp turns in the tunnel, and then at
+last a sea of noise and a veritable blaze of light.
+
+Part of the noise made King feel homesick, for out of the mountain's
+very womb brayed a music-box, such as the old-time carousels made use
+of before the days of electricity and steam. It was being worked by
+inexpert hands, for the time was something jerky; but it was robbed of
+its tinny meanness and even lent majesty by the hugeness of a
+cavern's roof, as well as by the crashing, swinging march it
+played--wild--wonderful--invented for lawless hours and a kingless
+people.
+
+“Marchons!--Citoyens!--”
+
+The procession began to tramp in time to it, and the rock shook. They
+deployed to left and right into a space so vast that the eye at first
+refused to try to measure it. It was the hollow core of a mountain,
+filled by the sea-sound of a human crowd and hung with huge stalactites
+that danced and shifted and flung back a thousand colors at the
+flickering light below.
+
+There was an undertone to the clangor of the music-box and the human
+hum, for across the cavern's farther end for a space of two hundred
+yards the great river rushed, penned here into a deep trough of less
+than a tenth its normal width--plunging out of a great fanged gap and
+hurrying out of view down another one, licking smooth banks on its way
+with a hungry sucking sound. Its depth where it crossed the cavern's
+end could only be guessed by remembering the half-mile breadth of the
+waterfall.
+
+There were little lamps everywhere, perched on ledges amid the
+stalactites, and they suffused the whole cavern in golden glow, made the
+crowd's faces look golden and cast golden shimmers on the cold, black
+river bed. There was scarcely any smoke, for the wind that went like a
+storm down the tunnel seemed to have its birth here; the air was fresh
+and cool and never still. No doubt fresh air was pouring in continually
+through some shaft in the rock, but the shaft was invisible.
+
+In the midst of the cavern a great arena had been left bare, and
+thousands of turbaned men squatted round it in rings. At the end where
+the river formed a tangent to them the rings were flattened, and at that
+point they were cut into by the ramp of a bridge, and by a lane left
+to connect the bridge with the arena. The bridge was almost the most
+wonderful of all.
+
+So delicately formed that fairies might have made it with a guttered
+candle, it spanned the river in one splendid sweep, twenty feet above
+water, like a suspension bridge. Then, so light and graceful that it
+scarcely seemed to touch anything at all, it swept on in irregular
+arches downward to the arena and ceased abruptly as if shorn off by a
+giant ax, at a point less than half-way to it.
+
+Its end formed a nearly square platform, about fourteen feet above
+the floor, and the broad track thence to the arena, as well as all the
+arena's boundary, had been marked off by great earthenware lamps, whose
+greasy smoke streaked up and was lost by the wind among the stalactites.
+
+“Greek lamps, every one of 'em!” King whispered to himself, but he
+wasted no time just then on trying to explain how Greek lamps had ever
+got there. There was too much else to watch and wonder at.
+
+No steps led down from the bridge end to the floor; toward the arena it
+was blind. But from the bridge's farther end across the hurrying water
+stairs had been hewn out of the rock wall and led up to a hole of twice
+a man's height, more than fifty feet above water level.
+
+On either side of the bridge end a passage had been left clear to the
+river edge, and nobody seemed to care to invade it, although it was not
+marked off in any way. Each passage was about fifty feet wide and quite
+straight. But the space between the bridge end and the arena, and the
+arena itself, had to be kept free from trespassers by fifty swaggering
+ruffians armed to the teeth.
+
+Every man of the thousands there had a knife in evidence, but the arena
+guards had magazine rifles well as Khyber tulwars. Nobody else wore
+firearms openly. Some of the arena guards bore huge round shields of
+prehistoric pattern of a size and sort he had never seen before, even
+in museums. But there was very little that he was seeing that night of a
+kind that he had seen before anywhere!
+
+The guards lolled insolently, conscious of brute strength and special
+favor. When any man trespassed with so much as a toe beyond the ring of
+lamps, a guard would slap his rifle-butt until the swivels rattled and
+the offender would scurry into bounds amid the jeers of any who had
+seen.
+
+Shoving, kicking and elbowing with set purpose, Ismail forced a way
+through the already seated crowd, and drew King down into the cramped
+space beside him, close enough to the arena to be able to catch the
+guards' low laughter. But he was restless. He wished to get nearer yet,
+only there seemed no room anywhere in front.
+
+The music-box was hidden. King could see it nowhere. Five minutes after
+he and Ismail were seated it stopped playing. The hum of the crowd died
+too.
+
+Then a guard threw his shield down with a clang and deliberately fired
+his rifle at the roof. The ricocheting bullet brought down a shower of
+splintered stone and stalactite, and he grinned as he watched the
+crowd dodge to avoid it. Before they had done dodging and while he yet
+grinned, a chant began--ghastly--tuneless--so out of time that the words
+were not intelligible--yet so obvious in general meaning that nobody
+could hear it and not understand.
+
+It was a devils' anthem, glorifying hellishness--suggestive of the
+gnashing of a million teeth, and the whicker of drawn blades--more
+shuddersome and mean than the wind of a winter's night. And it ceased as
+suddenly as it had begun.
+
+Another ruffian fired at the roof, and while the crack of the shot yet
+echoed seven other of the arena guards stepped forward with long horns
+and blew a blast. That was greeted by a yell that made the cavern
+tremble.
+
+Instantly a hundred men rose from different directions and raced for the
+arena, each with a curved sword in either hand. The yelling changed back
+into the chant, only louder than before, and by that much more terrible.
+Cymbals crashed. The music-box resumed its measured grinding of The
+Marseillaise. And the hundred began an Afridi sword dance, than which
+there is nothing wilder in all the world. Its like can only be seen
+under the shadow of the “Hills.”
+
+Ismail put his hands together and howled through them like a wolf on the
+war-path, nudging King with an elbow. So King imitated him, although one
+extra shout in all that din seemed thrown away.
+
+The dancers pranced in a circle, each man whirling both swords around
+his head and the head of the man in front of him at a speed that passed
+belief. Their long black hair shook and swayed. The sweat began to pour
+from them until their arms and shoulders glistened. The speed increased.
+Another hundred men leaped in, forming a new ring outside the first,
+only facing the other way. Another hundred and fifty formed a ring
+outside them again, with the direction again reversed; and two hundred
+and fifty more formed an outer circle--all careering at the limit of
+their power, gasping as the beasts do in the fury of fighting to the
+death, slitting the air until it whistled, with swords that missed human
+heads by immeasurable fractions of an inch.
+
+Ismail seemed obsessed by the spirit of hell let loose--drawn by it,
+as by a magnet, although subsequent events proved him not to have been
+altogether without a plan. He got up, with his eyes fixed on the dance,
+and dragged King with him to a place ten rows nearer the arena, that had
+been vacated by a dancer. There--two, where there was only rightly
+room for one--he thrust himself and King next to some Orakzai Pathans,
+elbowing savagely to right and left to make room. And patience proved
+scarce. The instant oaths of anything but greeting were like overture to
+a dog fight.
+
+“Bismillah!” swore the nearest man, deigning to use intelligible
+sentences at last. “Shall a dog of an Afridi bustle me?”
+
+He reached for the ever-ready Pathan knife, and Ismail, with both eyes
+on the dancing, neither heard nor saw. The Pathan leaned past King to
+stab, but paused in the instant that his knife licked clear. From a
+swift side-glance at King's face be changed to full stare, his scowl
+slowly giving place to a grin as he recognized him.
+
+“Allah!”
+
+He drove the long blade back again, fidgeting about to make more room
+and kicking out at his next neighbor to the same end, so that presently
+King sat on the rock floor instead of on other men's hip-bones.
+
+“Well met, hakim! See--the wound heals finely!”
+
+Baring his shoulder under the smelly sheepskin coat, he lifted a bandage
+gingerly to show the clean opening out of which King had coaxed a bullet
+the day before. It looked wholesome and ready to heal.
+
+“Name thy reward, hakim! We Orakzai Pathans forget no favors!” (Now that
+boast was a true one.)
+
+King glanced to his left and saw that there was no risk of being
+overheard or interrupted by Ismail; the Afridi was beating his fists
+together, rocking from side to side in frenzy, and letting out about one
+yell a minute that would have curdled a wolf's heart.
+
+“Nay, I have all I need!” he answered, and the Pathan laughed.
+
+“In thine own time, hakim! Need forgets none of us!”
+
+“True!” said King.
+
+He nodded more to himself than to the other man. He needed, for
+instance, very much to know who was planning a jihad, and who
+“Bull-with-a-beard” might be; but it was not safe to confide just yet in
+a chance-made acquaintance. A very fair acquaintance with some phases of
+the East had taught him that names such as Bull-with-a-beard are often
+almost photographically descriptive. He rose to his feet to look. A
+blind man can talk, but it takes trained eyes to gather information.
+
+The din had increased, and it was safe to stand up and stare, because
+all eyes were on the madness in the middle. There were plenty besides
+himself who stood to get a better view, and he had to dodge from side to
+side to see between them.
+
+“I'm not to doctor his men. Therefore it's a fair guess that he and
+I are to be kept apart. Therefore he'll be as far away from me now as
+possible, supposing he's here.”
+
+Reasoning along that line, he tried to see the face on the far side, but
+the problem was to see over the dancers' heads. He succeeded presently,
+for the Orakzai Pathan saw what he wanted, and in his anxiety to be
+agreeable, reached forward to pull back a box from between the ranks in
+front.
+
+Its owners offered instant fight, but made no further objection when
+they saw who wanted it and why. King wondered at their sudden change of
+mind, the Pathan looked actually grieved that a fight should have been
+spared him. He tried, with a few barbed insults, to rearouse a spark of
+enmity, but failed, to his own great discontent.
+
+The box was a commonplace affair, built square, of pine, and had
+probably contained somebody's new helmet at one stage of its career. The
+stenciled marks on its sides and top had long ago become obliterated by
+wear and dirt.
+
+King got up on it and gazed long at the rows of spectators on the far
+side, and having no least notion what to look for, he studied the faces
+one by one.
+
+“If he's important enough for her to have it in for him, he'll not be
+far from the front,” he reasoned and with that in mind he picked out
+several bull-necked, bearded men, any one of whom could easily have
+answered to the description. There were too many of them to give him any
+comfort, until the thought occurred to him that a man with brains enough
+to be a leader would not be so obsessed and excited by mere prancing
+athleticism as those men were. Then he looked farther along the line.
+
+He found a man soon who was not interested in the dancing, but who had
+eyes and ears apparently for everything and everybody else. He watched
+him for ten minutes, until at last their eyes met. Then he sat down and
+kicked the box back to its owners.
+
+He looked again at Ismail. With teeth clenched and eyes ablaze, the
+Afridi was smashing his knuckles together and rocking to and fro.
+There was no need to fear him. He turned and touched the Pathan's broad
+shoulder. The man smiled and bent his turbaned head to listen.
+
+“Opposite,” said King, “nearly exactly opposite--three rows back from
+the front, counting the front row as one--there sits a man with his arm
+in a sling and a bandage over his eye.”
+
+The Pathan nodded and touched his knife-hilt.
+
+“One-and-twenty men from him, counting him as one, sits a man with a big
+black beard, whose shoulders are like a bull's. As he sits he hangs his
+head between them--thus.”
+
+“And you want him killed? Nay, I think you mean Muhammad Anim. His time
+is not yet.”
+
+The suggestion was as good-naturedly prompt as if the hakim's need had
+been water, and the other's flask were empty. He was sorry he could not
+offer to oblige.
+
+“Who am I that I should want him killed?” King answered with mild
+reproof. “My trade is to heal, not slay. I am a hakim.”
+
+The other nodded.
+
+“Yet, to enter Khinjan Caves you had to slay a man, hakim or no!”
+
+“He was an unbeliever,” King answered modestly, and the other nodded
+again with friendly understanding.
+
+“What about the man yonder, then?” the Pathan asked. “What will you have
+of him?”
+
+“Look! See! Tell me truly what his name is!”
+
+The Pathan got up and strode forward to stand on the box, kicking aside
+the elbows that leaned on it and laughing when the owners cursed him.
+He stood on it and stared for five minutes, counting deliberately three
+times over, striking a finger on the palm of his hand to check himself.
+
+“Bull-with-a-beard!” he announced at last, dropping back into place
+beside King. “Muhammad Anim. The mullah Muhammad Anim.”
+
+“An Afghan?” King asked.
+
+“He says he is an Afghan. But unless he lies he is from Ishtamboul
+(Constantinople).”
+
+Itching to ask more questions, King sat still and held his peace. The
+direr the need of information in the “Hills,” and in all the East
+for that matter, the greater the wisdom, as a rule, of seeming
+uninquisitive. And wisdom was rewarded now, for the Pathan, who would
+have dried up under eager questioning, grew talkative. Civility and
+volubility are sometimes one, and not always only among the civilized.
+King--the hakim Kurram Khan--blinked mildly behind his spectacles and
+looked like one to whom a savage might safely ease his mind.
+
+“He bade me go to Sikaram where my village is and bring him a hundred
+men for his lashkar. He says he has her special favor. Wait and watch, I
+say!
+
+“Has he money?” asked King, apparently drawing a bow at a venture for
+conversation's sake. But there is an art in asking artless questions.
+
+“Aye! The liar says the Germans gave it to him! He swears they will send
+more. Who are the Germans? Who is a man who talks of a jihad that is
+to be, that he should have gold coin given him by unbelievers? I saw a
+German once, at Nuklao. He ate pig-meat and washed it down with wine.
+Are such men sons of the Prophet? Wait and watch, say I!”
+
+“Money?” said King. “He admits it? And none dare kill him for it? You
+say his time is not yet come?”
+
+More than ever it was obvious that the hakim was a very simple man. The
+Pathan made a gesture of contempt.
+
+“I dare what I will, hakim! But he says there is more money on the way!
+When he has it all--why--we are all in Allah's keeping--He decides!”
+
+“And should no more money come?”
+
+This was courteous conversation and received as such--many a long league
+removed from curiosity.
+
+“Who am I to foretell a man's kismet? I know what I know, and I think
+what I think! I know thee, hakim, for a gentle fellow, who hurt me
+almost not at all in the drawing of a bullet out of my flesh. What
+knowest thou about me?”
+
+“That I will dress the wound for thee again!”
+
+Artless statements are as useful in their way as artless questions. Let
+the guile lie deep, that is all.
+
+“Nay, nay! For she said nay! Shall I fall foul of her, for the sake of a
+new bandage?”
+
+The temptation was terrific to ask why she had given that order, but
+King resisted it; and presently it occurred to the Pathan that his own
+theories on the subject might be of interest.
+
+“She will use thee for a reward,” he said. “He who shall win and keep
+her favor may have his hurts dressed and his belly dosed. Her enemies
+may rot.”
+
+“Who is fool enough to be her enemy?” asked King, the altogether mild
+and guileless.
+
+The Pathan stuck out his tongue and squeezed his nose with one finger
+until it nearly disappeared into his face.
+
+“If she calls a man enemy, how shall he prove otherwise?” he answered.
+Then he rolled off center, to pull out his great snuff-box from the
+leather bag at his waist.
+
+“Does she call the mullah Muhammad Anim enemy?” King asked him.
+
+“Nay, she never mentions him by name.”
+
+“Art thou a man of thy word?” King asked.
+
+“When it suits me.”
+
+“There was a promise regarding my reward.”
+
+“Name it, hakim! We will see.”
+
+“Go tell the mullah Muhammad Anim where I sit!”
+
+The fellow laughed. He considered himself tricked; one could read that
+plainly enough; for taking polite messages does not come within the
+Hills' elastic code of izzat, although carrying a challenge is another
+matter. Yet he felt grateful for the hakim's service and was ready to
+seize the first cheap means of squaring the indebtedness.
+
+“Keep my place!” he ordered, getting up. He growled it, as some men
+speak to dogs, because growling soothed his ruffled vanity.
+
+He helped himself noisily to snuff then and began to clear a passage,
+kicking out to right and left and laughing when his victims protested.
+Before he had traversed fifty yards he had made himself more enemies
+than most men dare aspire to in a lifetime, and he seemed well pleased
+with the fruit of his effort.
+
+The dance went on for fifteen minutes yet, but then--quite
+unexpectedly--all the arena guards together fired a volley at the roof,
+and the dance stopped as if every dancer had been hit. The spectators
+were set surging by the showers of stone splinters, that hurt whom they
+struck, and their snarl was like a wolf-pack's when a tiger interferes.
+But the guards thought it all a prodigious joke and the more the crowd
+swore the more they laughed.
+
+Panting--foaming at the mouth, some of them--the dancers ran to their
+seats and set the crowd surging again, leaving the arena empty of all
+but the guards. The man whose seat Ismail had taken came staggering,
+slippery with sweat, and squeezed himself where he belonged, forcing
+King into the Pathan's empty place. Ismail threw his arms round the man
+and patted him, calling him “mighty dancer,” “son of the wind,” “prince
+of prancers,” “prince of swordsmen,” “war-horse,” and a dozen more
+endearing epithets. The fellow lay back across Ismail's knees,
+breathless but well enough contented.
+
+And after a few more minutes the Orakzai Pathan came back, and King
+tried to make room for him to sit.
+
+“I bade thee keep my place!” he growled, towering over King and plucking
+at his knife-belt irresolutely. He made it clear without troubling to
+use words that any other man would have had to fight, and the hakim
+might think himself lucky.
+
+“Take my seat,” said King, struggling to get up.
+
+“Nay, nay--sit still, thou. I can kick room for myself. So! So! So!”
+
+There was an answering snarl of hate that seemed like a song to him,
+amid which he sat down.
+
+“The mullah Muhammad Anim answered he knows nothing of thee and cares
+less! He said--and he said it with vehemence--it is no more to him where
+a hakim sits than where the rats hide!”
+
+He watched King's face and seeing that, King allowed his facial muscles
+to express chagrin.
+
+“Between us, it is a poor time for messages to him. He is too full of
+pride that his lashkar should have beaten the British.”
+
+“Did they beat the British greatly?” King asked him, with only vague
+interest on his face and a prayer inside him that his heart might
+flutter less violently against his ribs. His voice was as non-committal
+as the mullah's message.
+
+“Who knows, when so many men would rather lie than kill? Each one who
+returned swears he slew a hundred. But some did not return. Wait and
+watch, say I!”
+
+Now a man stood up near the edge of the crowd whom King recognized;
+and recognition brought no joy with it. The mullah without hair or
+eyelashes, who had admitted him and his party through the mosque into
+the Caves, strode out to the middle of the arena all alone, strutting
+and swaggering. He recalled the man's last words and drew no consolation
+from them, either.
+
+“Many have entered! Some went out by a different road!”
+
+Cold chills went down his back. All at once Ismail's manner became
+unencouraging. He ceased to make a fuss over the dancer and began to eye
+King sidewise, until at last he seemed unable to contain the malice that
+would well forth.
+
+“At the gate there were only words!” he whispered. “Here in this cavern
+men wait for proof!”
+
+He licked his teeth suggestively, as a wolf does when he contemplates
+a meal. Then, as an afterthought, as though ashamed, “I love thee! Thou
+art a man after my own heart! But I am her man! Wait and see!”
+
+The mullah in the arena, blinking with his lashless eyes, held both
+arms up for silence in the attitude of a Christian priest blessing
+a congregation. The guards backed his silent demand with threatening
+rifles. The din died to a hiss of a thousand whispers, and then the
+great cavern grew still, and only the river could be heard sucking
+hungrily between the smooth stone banks.
+
+“God is great!” the mullah howled.
+
+“God is great!” the crowd thundered in echo to him; and then the vault
+took up the echoes. “God is great--is great--is great--ea--ea--eat!”
+
+“And Muhammad is His prophet!” howled the mullah. Instantly they
+answered him again.
+
+“And Muhammad is His prophet!”
+
+“His prophet--is His prophet--is His prophet!” said the stalactites, in
+loud barks--then in murmurs--then in awe-struck whispers.
+
+That seemed to be all the religious ritual Khinjan remembered or could
+tolerate. Considering that the mullah, too, must have killed his man
+in cold blood before earning the right to be there, perhaps it was
+enough--too much. There were men not far from King who shuddered.
+
+“There are strangers!” announced the mullah, as a man might say, “I
+smell a rat!” But he did not look at anybody in particular; he blinked
+at the crowd.
+
+“Strangers!” said the stalactites, in an awe-struck whisper.
+
+“Show them! Show them! Let them stand forth!”
+
+“Oh-h-h-h-h! Let them stand forth!” said the roof.
+
+The mullah bowed as if that idea were a new one and he thought it better
+than his own; for all crowds love flattery.
+
+“Bring them!” he shouted, and King suppressed a shudder--for what proof
+had he of right to be there beyond Ismail's verbal corroboration of a
+lie? Would Ismail lie for him again? he wondered. And if so, would the
+lie be any use?
+
+Not far from where King sat there was an immediate disturbance in the
+crowd, and a wretched-looking Baluchi was thrust forward at a run, with
+arms lashed to his sides and a pitiful look of terror on his face. Two
+more Baluchis were hustled along after him, protesting a little, but
+looking almost as hopeless.
+
+Once in the arena, the guards took charge of all three of them and lined
+them up facing the mullah, clubbing them with their rifle-butts to
+get quick obedience. The crowd began to be noisy again, but the mullah
+signed for silence.
+
+“These are traitors!” he howled, with a gesture such as Ajax might have
+used when he defied the lightning.
+
+The roof said “Traitors!”
+
+“Slay them, then!” howled the crowd, delighted. And blinking behind the
+horn-rimmed spectacles, King began to look about busily for hope, where
+there did not seem to be any.
+
+“Nay, hear me first!” the mullah howled, and his voice was like a wolf's
+at hunting time. “Hear, and be warned!”
+
+The crowd grew very still, but King saw that some men licked their lips,
+as if they well knew what was coming.
+
+“These three men came, and one was a new man!” the mullah howled. “The
+other two were his witnesses! All three swore that the first man came
+from slaying an unbeliever in the teeth of written law. They said he ran
+from the law. So, as the custom is, I let all three enter!”
+
+“Good!” said the crowd. “Good!” They might have been five thousand
+judges, judging in equity, so grave they were. Yet they licked their
+lips.
+
+“But later, word came to me saying they are liars. So--again as the
+custom is--I ordered them bound and held!”
+
+“Slay them! Slay them!” the crowd yelped, gleeful as a wolf-pack on a
+scent and abandoning solemnity as suddenly as it had been assumed. “Slay
+them!”
+
+They were like the wind, whipping in and out among Khinjan's rocks,
+savage and then still for a minute, savage and then still.
+
+“Nay, there is a custom yet!” the mullah howled, holding up both arms.
+And there was silence again like the lull before a hurricane, with only
+the great black river talking to itself.
+
+“Who speaks for them? Does any speak for them?”
+
+“Speak for them?” said the roof.
+
+There was silence. Then there was a murmur of astonishment. Over
+opposite to where King sat the mullah stood up, who the Pathan had said
+was “Bull-with-a-beard”--Muhammad Anim.
+
+“The men are mine!” he growled. His voice was like a bear's at bay; it
+was low, but it carried strangely. And as he spoke he swung his great
+head between his shoulders, like a bear that means to charge. “The proof
+they brought has been stolen! They had good proof! I speak for them! The
+men are mine!”
+
+The Pathan nudged King in the ribs with an elbow like a club and tickled
+his ear with hot breath.
+
+“Bull-with-a-beard speaks truth!” he grinned. “'Truth and a lie
+together! Good may it do him and them! They die, they three Baluchis!”
+
+“Proof!” howled the mullah who had no hair eyelashes.
+
+“Proof--oof--oof!” said the stalactites.
+
+“Proof! Show us proof!” yelled the crowd.
+
+“Words at the gate--proof in the cavern!” howled the lashless one.
+
+The Pathan next King leaned over to whisper to him again, but stiffened
+in the act. There was a great gasp the same instant, as the whole crowd
+caught its breath all together. The mullah in the middle froze into
+immobility. Bull-with-a-beard stood mumbling, swaying his great head from
+side to side, no longer suggestive of a bear about to charge, but of one
+who hesitates.
+
+The crowd was staring at the end of the bridge. King stared, too, and
+caught his own breath. For Yasmini stood there, smiling on them all as
+the new moon smiles down on the Khyber! She had come among them like a
+spirit, all unheralded.
+
+So much more beautiful than the one likeness King had seen of her that
+for a second he doubted who she was--more lovely than he had imagined
+her even in his dreams--she stood there, human and warm and real, who
+had begun to seem a myth, clad in gauzy transparent stuff that made no
+secret of sylph-like shapeliness and looking nearly light enough to blow
+away. Her feet--and they were the most marvelously molded things he had
+ever seen--were naked and played restlessly on the naked stone. Not one
+part of her was still for a fraction of a second; yet the whole effect
+was of insolently lazy ease.
+
+Her eyes blazed brighter than the little jewels stitched to her gossamer
+dress, and when a man once looked at them he did not find it easy to
+look away again. Even mullah Muhammad Anim seemed transfixed, like a
+great foolish animal.
+
+But King was staring very hard indeed at something else--mentally
+cursing the plain glass spectacles he wore, that had begun to film over
+and dim his vision. There were two bracelets on her arm, both barbaric
+things of solid gold. The smaller of the two was on her wrist and the
+larger on her upper arm, but they were so alike, except for size, and so
+exactly like the one Rewa Gunga had given him in her name and that had
+been stolen from him in the night, that he ran the risk of removing the
+glasses a moment to stare with unimpeded eyes. Even then the distance
+was too great. He could not quite see.
+
+But her eyes began to search the crowd in his direction, and then he
+knew two things absolutely. He was sitting where she had ordered Ismail
+to place him; for she picked him out almost instantly, and laughed as
+if somebody had struck a silver bell. And one of those bracelets was the
+one that he had worn; for she flaunted it at him, moving her arm so that
+the light should make the gold glitter.
+
+Then, perhaps because the crowd had begun to whisper, and she wanted all
+attention, she raised both arms to toss back the golden hair that came
+cascading nearly to her knees. And as if the crowd knew that symptom
+well, it drew its breath in sharply and grew very still.
+
+“Muhammad Anim!” she said, and she might have been wooing him. “That was
+a devil's trick!”
+
+It was rather an astounding statement, coming from lovely lips in such
+a setting. It was rather suggestive of a driver's whiplash, flicked
+through the air for a beginning. Muhammad Anim continued glaring and did
+not answer her, so in her own good time, when she had tossed her golden
+hair back once or twice again, she developed her meaning.
+
+“We who are free of Khinjan Caves do not send men out to bring recruits.
+We know better than to bid our men tell lies for others at the gate.
+Nor, seeking proof for our new recruit, do we send men to hunt a head
+for him--not even those of us who have a lashkar that we call our own,
+mullah Muhammad Anim. Each of us earns his own way in!”
+
+The mullah Muhammad Anim began to stroke his beard, but he made no
+answer.
+
+“And--mullah Muhammad Anim, thou wandering man of God--when that lashkar
+has foolishly been sent and has failed, is it written in the Kalamullah
+saying we should pretend there was a head, and that the head was stolen?
+A lie is a lie, Muhammad Anim! Wandering perhaps is good, if in search
+of the way. Is it good to lose the way, and to lie, thou true follower
+of the Prophet?”
+
+She smiled, tossing her hair back. Her eyes challenged, her lips mocked
+him and her chin scorned. The crowd breathed hard and watched. The
+mullah muttered something in his beard, and sat down, and the crowd
+began to roar applause at her. But she checked it with a regal gesture,
+and a glance of contempt at the mullah that was alone worth a journey
+across the “Hills” to see.
+
+“Guards!” she said quietly. And the crowd's sigh then was like the night
+wind in a forest.
+
+“Away with those three of Muhammad Anim's men!”
+
+Twelve of the arena guards threw down their shields with a sudden
+clatter and seized the prisoners, four to each. The crowd shivered with
+delicious anticipation. The doomed men neither struggled nor cried,
+for fatalism is an anodyne as well as an explosive. King set his teeth.
+Yasmini, with both hands behind her head, continued to smile down on
+them all as sweetly as the stars shine on a battle-field.
+
+She nodded once; and then all was over in a minute. With a ringing “Ho!”
+ and a run, the guards lifted their victims shoulder high and bore them
+forward. At the river bank they paused for a second to swing them. Then,
+with another “Ho!” they threw them like dead rubbish into the swift
+black water.
+
+There was only one wild scream that went echoing and re-echoing to the
+roof. There was scarcely a splash, and no extra ripple at all. No heads
+came up again to gasp. No fingers clutched at the surface. The fearful
+speed of the river sucked them under, to grind and churn and pound them
+through long caverns underground and hurl them at last over the great
+cataract toward the middle of the world.
+
+“Ah-h-h-h-h!” sighed the crowd in ecstasy.
+
+“Is there no other stranger?” asked Yasmini, searching for King again
+with her amazing eyes. The skin all down his back turned there and then
+into gooseflesh. And as her eyes met his she laughed like a bell at him.
+She knew! She knew who he was, how he had entered, and how he felt. Not
+a doubt of it!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XI
+
+
+     Long slept the Heart o' the Hills, oh, long!
+     (Ye who have watched, ye know!)
+     As sap sleeps in the deodars
+     When winter shrieks and steely stars
+     Blink over frozen snow.
+     Ye haste? The sap stirs now, ye say?
+     Ye feel the pulse of spring?
+     But sap must rise ere buds may break,
+     Or cubs fare forth, or bees awake,
+     Or lean buck spurn the ling!
+
+
+“Kurram Khan!” the lashless mullah howled, like a lone wolf in the
+moonlight, and King stood up.
+
+It is one of the laws of Cocker, who wrote the S. S. Code, that a man
+is alive until he is proved dead, and where there is life there is
+opportunity. In that grim minute King felt heretical; but a man's
+feelings are his own affair provided he can prove it, and he managed to
+seem about as much at ease as a native hakim ought to feel at such an
+initiation.
+
+“Come forward!” the mullah howled, and he obeyed, treading gingerly
+between men who were at no pains to let him by, and silently blessing
+them, because he was not really in any hurry at all. Yasmini looked
+lovely from a distance, and life was sweet.
+
+“Who are his witnesses?”
+
+“Witnesses?” the roof hissed.
+
+“I!” shouted Ismail, jumping up.
+
+“I!” cracked the roof. “I! I!” So that for a second King almost believed
+he had a crowd of men to swear for him and did not hear Darya Khan at
+all, who rose from a place not very far behind where had sat.
+
+Ismail followed him in a hurry, like a man wading a river with loose
+clothes gathered in one arm and the other arm ready in case of falling.
+He took much less trouble than King not to tread on people, and oaths'
+marked his wake.
+
+Darya Khan did not go so fast. As he forced his way forward a man passed
+him up the wooden box that King had used to stand on; he seized it in
+both hands with a grin and a jest and went to stand behind King and
+Ismail, in line with the lashless mullah, facing Yasmini. Yasmini smiled
+at them all as if they were actors in her comedy, and she well pleased
+with them.
+
+“Look ye!” howled the mullah. “Look ye and look well, for this is to be
+one of us!”
+
+King felt ten thousand eyes burn holes in his back, but the one pair of
+eyes that mocked him from the bridge was more disconcerting.
+
+“Turn, Kurram Khan! Turn that all may see!”
+
+Feeling like a man on a spit, he revolved slowly. By the time he had
+turned once completely around, besides knowing positively that one of
+the two bracelets on her right arm was the one he had worn, or else its
+exact copy, he knew that he was not meant to die yet; for his eyes could
+work much more swiftly than the horn-rimmed spectacles made believe. He
+decided that Yasmini meant he should be frightened, but not much hurt
+just yet.
+
+So he ceased altogether to feel frightened and took care to look more
+scared than ever.
+
+“Who paid the price of thy admission?” the mullah howled, and King
+cleared his throat, for he was not quite sure yet what that might mean.
+
+“Speak, Kurram Khan!” Yasmini purred, smiling her loveliest. “Tell them
+whom you slew.”
+
+King turned and faced the crowd, raising himself on the balls of his
+feet to shout, like a man facing thousands of troops on parade. He
+nearly gave himself away, for habit had him unawares. A native hakim,
+given the stoutest lungs in all India, would not have shouted in that
+way.
+
+“Cappitin Attleystan King!” he roared. And he nearly jumped out of
+his skin when his own voice came rattling back at him from the roof
+overhead.
+
+“Cappitin Attleystan King!” it answered.
+
+Yasmini chuckled as a little rill will sometimes chuckle among ferns. It
+was devilish. It seemed to say there were traps not far ahead.
+
+“Where was he slain?” asked the mullah.
+
+“In the Khyber Pass,” said King.
+
+“In the Khyber Pass!” the roof whispered hoarsely, as if aghast at such
+cold-bloodedness.
+
+“Now give proof!” said the mullah. “Words at the gate--proof in the
+cavern! Without good proof, there is only one way out of here!”
+
+“Proof!” the crowd thundered. “Proof!”
+
+“Proof! Proof! Proof!” the roof echoed.
+
+There was no need for Darya Khan to whisper. King's hands were behind
+him, and he had seen what he had seen and guessed what he had guessed
+while he was turning to let the crowd look at him. His fingers closed on
+human hair.
+
+“Nay, it is short!” hissed Darya Khan. “Take the two ears, or hold it by
+the jawbone! Hold it high in both hands!”
+
+King obeyed, without looking at the thing, and Ismail, turning to face
+the crowd, rose on tiptoe and filled his lungs for the effort of his
+life.
+
+“The head of Cappitin Attleystan King--infidel kaffir--British
+arrficer!” he howled.
+
+“Good!” the crowd bellowed. “Good! Throw it!”
+
+The crowd's roar and the roof's echoes combined until pandemonium.
+
+“Throw it to them, Kurram Khan!” Yasmini purred from the bridge end,
+speaking as softly and as sweetly, as if she coaxed a child. Yet her
+voice carried.
+
+He lowered the head, but instead of looking at it he looked up at her.
+He thought she was enjoying herself and his predicament as he had never
+seen any one enjoy anything.
+
+“Throw it to them, Kurram Khan!” she purred. “It is the custom!”
+
+“Throw it! Throw it!” the crowd thundered.
+
+He turned the ghastly thing until it lay face-upward in his hands, and
+so at last he saw it. He caught his breath, and only the horn-rimmed
+spectacles, that he had cursed twice that night, saved him from
+self-betrayal. The cavern seemed to sway, but he recovered and his wits
+worked swiftly. If Yasmini detected his nervousness she gave no sign.
+
+“Throw it! Throw it! Throw it!”
+
+The crowd was growing impatient. Many men were standing, waving their
+arms to draw attention to themselves, and he wondered what the ultimate
+end of the head would be, if he obeyed and threw it to them. Watching
+Yasmini's eyes, he knew it had not entered her head that he might
+disobey.
+
+He looked past her toward the river. There were no guards near enough to
+prevent what he intended; but he had to bear in mind that the guards
+had rifles, and if he acted too suddenly one of them might shoot at him
+unbidden. They were wondrous free with their cartridges, those guards,
+in a land where ammunition is worth its weight in silver coin.
+
+Holding the head before him with both hands, he began to walk toward the
+river, edging all the while a little toward the crowd as if meaning to
+get nearer before he threw.
+
+He was much more than half-way to the river's edge before Yasmini or
+anybody else divined his true intention. The mullah grew suspicions
+first and yelled. Then King hurried, for he did not believe Yasmini
+would need many seconds in which to regain command of any situation. But
+she saw fit to stand still and watch.
+
+He reached the river and stood there. Now he was in no hurry at all, for
+it stood to reason that unless Yasmini very much desired him to be kept
+alive he would have been shot dead already. For a moment the crowd was
+so interested that it forgot to bark and snarl.
+
+His next move was as deliberate as he could make it, although he was
+careful to avoid the least suggestion of mummery (for then the crowd
+would have suspected disloyalty to Islam, and the “Hills” are very, very
+pious, and very suspicious of all foreign ritual).
+
+He did a thoughtful simple thing that made every savage who watched him
+gasp because of its very unexpectedness. He held the head in both
+hands, threw it far out into the river and stood to watch it sink. Then,
+without visible emotion of any kind, he walked back stolidly to face
+Yasmini at the bridge end, with shoulders a little more stubborn now
+than they ought to be, and chin a shade too high, for there never was a
+man who could act quite perfectly.
+
+“Thou fool!” Yasmini whispered through lips that did not move.
+
+She betrayed a flash of temper like a trapped she-tiger's, but followed
+it instantly with her loveliest smile. Like to like, however, the crowd
+saw the flash of temper and took its cue from that.
+
+“Slay him!” yelled a lone voice, that was greeted an approving murmur.
+
+“Slay him!” advised the roof in a whisper, in one of its phonetic
+tricks.
+
+“This is a darbar!” Yasmini announced in a rising, ringing voice. “My
+darbar, for I summoned it! Did I invite any man to speak?”
+
+There was silence, as a whipped unwilling pack is silent.
+
+“Speak, thou, Kurram Khan!” she said. “Knowing the custom--having heard
+the order to throw that trophy to them--why act otherwise? Explain!”
+
+Nothing in the wide world could be fairer! She left him to extricate
+himself from a mess of his own making! It was more than fair, for she
+went out of her way to offer him an opening to jump through. And she
+paid him the compliment of suggesting be must be clever enough to take
+it, for she seemed to expect a satisfying answer.
+
+“Tell them why!” she said, smiling. No man could have guessed by the
+tone of her voice whether she was for him or against him, and the crowd,
+beginning again to whisper, watched to see which way the cat would jump.
+
+He bowed low to her three times--very low indeed and very slowly, for he
+had to think. Then he turned his back and repeated the obeisance to the
+crowd. Still he could think of no excuse, except Cocker's Rule No. I for
+Tight Places, and all the world knows that because Solomon said much the
+same thing first:
+
+“A soft answer is better than a sword!”
+
+But Cocker adds, “Never excuse. Explain! And blame no man.”
+
+“My brothers,” he said, and paused, since a man must make a beginning,
+even when he can not see the end. And as he spoke the answer came to
+him. He stood upright, and his voice became that of a man whose advice
+has been asked, and who gives it freely. “These be stirring times! Ye
+need take care, my brothers! Ye saw this night how one man entered here
+on the strength of an oath and a promise. All he lacked was proof. And I
+had proof. Ye saw! Who am I that I should deny you a custom? Yet--think
+ye, my brothers!--how easy would it not have been, had I thrown that
+head to you, for a traitor to catch it and hide it in his clothes,
+and make away with it! He could have used it to admit to these
+caves--why--even an Englishman, my brothers! If that had happened, ye
+would have blamed me!”
+
+Yasmini smiled. Taking its cue from her, the crowd murmured, scarcely
+assent, but rather recognition of the hakim's adroitness. The game
+was not won; there lacked a touch to tip the scales in his favor, and
+Yasmini supplied it with ready genius.
+
+“The hakim speaks truth!” she laughed.
+
+King turned about instantly to face her, but he salaamed so low that she
+could not have seen his expression had she tried.
+
+“If Ye wish it, I will order him tossed into Earth's Drink after those
+other three.”
+
+Muhammed Anim rose stroking his beard and rocking where he stood.
+
+“It is the law!” he growled, and King shuddered.
+
+“It is the law,” Yasmini answered in a voice that rang with pride and
+insolence, “that none interrupt me while I speak! For such ill-mannered
+ones Earth's Drink hungers! Will you test my authority, Muhammad Anim?”
+
+The mullah sat down, and hundreds of men laughed at him, but not all of
+the men by any means.
+
+“It is the law that none goes out of Khinjan Cave alive who breaks the
+law of the Caves. But he broke no very big law. And he spoke truth.
+Think Ye! If that head had only fallen into Muhammad Anim's lap, the
+mullah might have smuggled in another man with it!”
+
+A roar of laughter greeted that thrust. Many men who had not laughed at
+the mullah's first discomfiture, joined in now. Muhammad Anim sat and
+fidgeted, meeting nobody's eye and answering nothing.
+
+“So it seems to me good,” Yasmini said, in a voice that did not echo any
+more but rang very clear and true (she seemed to know the trick of the
+roof, and to use the echo or not as she chose), “to let this hakim live!
+He shall meditate in his cave a while, and perhaps he shall be beaten,
+lest he dare offend again. He can no more escape from Khinjan Caves than
+the women who are prisoners here. He may therefore live!”
+
+There was utter silence. Men looked at one another and at her, and her
+blazing eyes searched the crowd swiftly. It was plain enough that there
+were at least two parties there, and that none dared oppose Yasmini's
+will for fear of the others.
+
+“To thy seat, Kurram Khan!” she ordered, when she had waited a full
+minute and no man spoke.
+
+He wasted no time. He hurried out of the arena as fast as he could walk,
+with Ismail and Darya Khan close at his heels. It was like a run out of
+danger in a dream. He stumbled over the legs of the front-rank men in
+his hurry to get back to his place, and Ismail overtook him, seized him
+by the shoulders, hugged him, and dragged him to the empty seat next to
+the Orakzai Pathan. There he hugged him until his ribs cracked.
+
+“Ready o' wit!” he crowed. “Ready o' tongue! Light o' life! Man after
+mine own heart! Hey, I love thee! Readily I would be thy man, but for
+being hers! Would I had a son like thee! Fool--fool--fool not to throw
+the head to them! Squeamish one! Man like a child! What is the head
+but earth when the life has left it? What would thy head be without the
+nimble wit? Fool--fool--fool! And clever! Turned the joke on Muhammad
+Anim! Turned it on Bull-with-a-beard in a twinkling--in the bat of an
+eye--in a breath! Turned it against her enemy and raised a laugh against
+him from his own men! Ready o' wit! Shameless one! Lucky one! Allah was
+surely good to thee!”
+
+Still exulting, he let go, but none too soon for comfort. King's ribs
+were sore from his hugging for days.
+
+“What is it?” he asked. For King seemed to be shaping words with his
+lips. He bent a great hairy ear to listen.
+
+“Have they taken Ali Masjid Fort?” King whispered.
+
+“How should I know? Why?”
+
+“Tell me, man, if you love me! Have they taken it?”
+
+“Nay, how should I know? Ask her! She knows more than any man knows!”
+
+King turned to ask the same question of his friend the Orakzai Pathan;
+but the Pathan would have none of his questions, he was busy listening
+for whispers from the crowd, watching with both eyes, and he shoved King
+aside.
+
+The crowd was very far from being satisfied. An angry murmur had begun
+to fill the cavern as a hive is filled with the song of bees at swarming
+time. But even so, surmise what one might, it was not easy to persuade
+the eye that Yasmini's careless smile and easy poise were assumed.
+If she recognized indignation and feared it, she disguised her fear
+amazingly.
+
+King saw her whisper to a guard. The fellow nodded and passed his shield
+to another man. He began to make his way in no great hurry toward the
+edge of the arena. She whispered again and standing forward with their
+trumpets seven of the guards blew a blast that split across the cavern
+like the trump of doom; and as its hundred thousand echoes died in the
+roof, the hum of voices died, too, and the very sound of breathing. The
+gurgling of water became as if the river flowed in solitude.
+
+Leisurely then, languidly, she raised both arms until she looked like an
+angel poised for flight. The little jewels stitched to her gauzy dress
+twinkled like fire-flies as she moved. The crowd gasped sharply. She had
+it by the heart-strings.
+
+She called, and four guards got under one shield, bowing their heads and
+resting the great rim on their shoulders. They carried it beneath her
+and stood still. With a low delicious laugh, sweet and true, she sprang
+on it, and the shield scarcely trembled; she seemed lighter than the
+silk her dress was woven from!
+
+They carried her so, looking as if she and the shield were carved of a
+piece, and by a master such as has not often been. And in the midst of
+the arena before they had ceased moving she began to sing, with her head
+thrown back and bosom swelling like a bird's.
+
+The East would ever rather draw its own conclusions from a hint let fall
+than be puzzled by what the West believes are facts. And parables are
+not good evidence in courts of law, which is always a consideration. So
+her song took the form of a parable.
+
+And to say that she took hold of them and played rhapsodies of her own
+making on their heart-strings would be to undervalue what she did. They
+were dumb while she sang, but they rose at her. Not a force in the
+world could have kept them down, for she was deftly touching cords that
+stirred other forces--subtle, mysterious, mesmeric, which the old East
+understands--which Muhammad the Prophet understood when he harnessed
+evil in the shafts with men and wrote rules for their driving in a book.
+They rose in silence and stood tense.
+
+While she sang, the guard to whom she had whispered forced a way through
+the ranks of the standing crowd, and came behind Ismail. He tweaked
+the Afridi's ear to draw attention, for like all the others--like King,
+too--Ismail was listening with dropped jaw and watching with burning
+eyes. For a minute they whispered, so low that King did not hear what
+they said; and then the guard forced his way back by the shortest route
+to the arena, knocking down half a dozen men and gaining safety beyond
+the lamps before his victims could draw knife and follow him.
+
+Yasmini's song went on, verse after verse, telling never one fact, yet
+hinting unutterable things in a language that was made for hint and
+metaphor and parable and innuendo. What tongue did not hint at was
+conveyed by subtle gesture and a smile and flashing eyes. It was
+perfectly evident that she knew more than King--more than the general at
+Peshawur--more than the viceroy at Simla--probably more than the British
+government--concerning what was about to happen in Islam. The others
+might guess. She knew. It was just as evident that she would not tell.
+The whole of her song, and it took her twenty minutes by the count of
+King's pulse, to sing it, was a warning to wait and a promise of amazing
+things to come.
+
+She sang of a wolf-pack gathering from the valleys in the winter snow--a
+very hungry wolf-pack. Then of a stalled ox, grown very fat from being
+cared for. Of the “Heart of the Hills” that awoke in the womb of the
+“Hills,” and that listened and watched.
+
+“Now, is she the 'Heart of the Hills'?” King wondered. The rumors men
+had heard and told again in India, about the “Heart of the Hills” in
+Khinjan seemed to have foundation.
+
+He thought of the strange knife, wrapped in a handkerchief under his
+shirt, with its bronze blade and gold hilt in the shape of a woman
+dancing. The woman dancing was astonishingly like Yasmini, standing on
+the shield!
+
+She sang about the owners of the stalled ox, who were busy at bay,
+defending themselves and their ox from another wolf-pack in another
+direction “far beyond.”
+
+She urged them to wait a little while. The ox was big enough and fat
+enough to nourish all the wolves in the world for many seasons. Let
+them wait, then, until another, greater wolf-pack joined them, that they
+might go hunting all together, overwhelm its present owners and devour
+the ox! So urged the “Heart of the Hills,” speaking to the mountain
+wolves, according to Yasmini's song.
+
+        “The little cubs in the burrows know.
+        Are ye grown wolves, who hurry so?”
+
+She paused, for effect; but they gave tongue then because they could not
+help it, and the cavern shook to their terrific worship.
+
+“Allah! Allah!”
+
+They summoned God to come and see the height and depth and weight of
+their allegiance to her! And because for their thunder there was no more
+chance of being heard, she dropped from the shield like a blossom. No
+sound of falling could have been heard in all that din, but one could
+see she made no sound. The shield-bearers ran back to the bridge and
+stood below it, eyes agape.
+
+Rewa Gunga spoke truth in Delhi when he assured King he should some day
+wonder at Yasmini's dancing.
+
+She became joy and bravery and youth! She danced a story for them of the
+things they knew. She was the dawn light, touching the distant peaks.
+She was the wind that follows it, sweeping among the junipers and
+kissing each as she came. She was laughter, as the little children
+laugh when the cattle are loosed from the byres at last to feed in the
+valleys. She was the scent of spring uprising. She was blossom. She was
+fruit! Very daughter of the sparkle of warm sun on snow, she was the
+“Heart of the Hills” herself!
+
+Never was such dancing! Never such an audience! Never such mad applause!
+She danced until the great rough guards had to run round the arena with
+clubbed butts and beat back trespassers who would have mobbed her. And
+every movement--every gracious wonder-curve and step with which she
+told her tale was as purely Greek as the handle on King's knife and the
+figures on the lamp-bowls and as the bracelets on her arm. Greek!
+
+And she half-modern-Russian, ex-girl-wife of a semi-civilized
+Hill-rajah! Who taught her? There is nothing new, even in Khinjan, in the
+“Hills”!
+
+And when the crowd defeated the arena guards at last and burst through
+the swinging butts to seize and fling her high and worship her with
+mad barbaric rite, she ran toward the shield. The four men raised it
+shoulder-high again. She went to it like a leaf in the wind--sprang on
+it as if wings had lifted her, scarce touching it with naked toes--and
+leapt to the bridge with a laugh.
+
+She went over the bridge on tiptoes, like nothing else under heaven but
+Yasmini at her bewitchingest. And without pausing on the far side she
+danced up the hewn stone stairs, dived into the dark hole and was gone!
+
+“Come!” yelled Ismail in King's ear. He could have heard nothing less,
+for the cavern was like to burst apart from the tumult.
+
+“Whither?” the Afridi shouted in disgust. “Does the wind ask whither?
+Come like the wind and see! They will remember next that they have a
+bone to pick with thee! Come away!”
+
+That seemed good enough advice. He followed as fast as Ismail could
+shoulder a way out between the frantic Hillmen, deafened, stupefied,
+numbed, almost cowed by the ovation they were giving their “Heart of
+their Hills.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XII
+
+
+
+     A scorpion in a corner stings himself to death.
+     A coward blames the gods. They laugh and let him die
+     A man goes forward
+     --Native Proverb
+
+
+As they disappeared after a scramble through the mouth of the same
+tunnel they had entered by, a roar went up behind them like the birth of
+earthquakes. Looking back over his shoulder, King saw Yasmini come back
+into the hole's mouth, to stand framed in it and bow acknowledgment.
+She looked so ravishing in contrast to the huge grim wall, and the black
+river, and the darkness at her back, that Khinjan's thousands tried to
+storm the bridge and drag her down to them. The guards were hard put to
+it, with their backs to the bridge end, for two or three minutes.
+
+But Ismail would not let him wait and watch from there. He dragged him
+down the tunnel and pushed him up on to a ledge where they could both
+see without being seen, through a fissure in the rock.
+
+For the space of five minutes Yasmini stood in the great hole, smiling
+and watching the struggle below. Then she went, and the guards began to
+get the best of it, because the crowd's enthusiasm waned when they could
+see her no more. Then suddenly the guards began to loose random volleys
+at the roof and brought down hundredweights of splintered stalactite.
+
+Within a minute there were a hundred men busy sweeping up the
+splinters. In another minute twenty Zakka Khels had begun a sword dance,
+yelling like the damned. A hundred joined them. In three minutes more
+the whole arena was a dinning whirlpool, and the river's voice was
+drowned in shouting and the stamping of naked feet on stone.
+
+“Come!” urged Ismail, and led the way.
+
+King's last impression was of earth's womb on fire and of hellions
+brewing wrath. The stalactites and the hurrying river multiplied the
+dancing lights into a million, and the great roof hurled the din down
+again to make confusion with the new din coming up.
+
+Ismail went like a rat down a run, and King failed to overtake him until
+he found him in the cave of the slippers kicking to right and left at
+random.
+
+“Choose a good pair!” he growled. “Let late-comers fight for what is
+left! Nay, I have thine! Choose thou the next best!”
+
+The statement being one of fact, and that no time or place for a quarrel
+with the only friend in sight, King picked out the best slippers he
+could see. The instant he had them on Ismail was off again, running like
+the wind.
+
+They had no torch. They left the little tunnel lamps behind. It became
+so dark that King had to follow by ear, and so it happened that he
+missed seeing where the tunnel forked. He imagined they were running
+back toward the ledge under the waterfall; yet, when Ismail called a
+halt at last, panting, groped behind a great rock for a lamp and lit the
+wick with a common safety match, they were in a cave he had never seen
+before.
+
+“Where are we?” King asked.
+
+“Where none dare seek us.”
+
+Ismail held the lamp high, shielding its wick with a hollowed palm and
+peering about him as if in doubt, his ragged beard looking like smoke in
+the wind; for a wind blew down all the passages in Khinjan.
+
+King examined the lamp. It was of bronze and almost as surely ancient
+Greek as it surely was not Indian. There were figures graven on the bowl
+representing a woman dancing, who looked not unlike Yasmini; but before
+he had time to look very closely Ismail blew the lamp out and was off
+again, like a shadow shot into its mother night.
+
+Confused by the sudden darkness King crashed into a rock as he tried to
+follow. Ismail turned back and gave him the end of a cotton girdle that
+he unwound from his waist; then he plunged ahead again into Cimmerian
+blackness, down a passage so narrow that they could touch a wall with
+either hand.
+
+Once he shouted back to duck, and they passed under a low roof where
+water dripped on them, and the rock underfoot was the bed of a shallow
+stream. After that the track began to rise, and the grade grew so steep
+that even Ismail, the furious, had to slacken pace.
+
+They began to climb up titanic stairways all in the dark, feeling their
+way through fissures in a mountain's framework, up zigzag ledges, and
+over great broken lumps of rock from one cave to another; until at last
+in one great cave Ismail stopped and relit the lamp. Hunting about with
+its aid he found an imported “hurricane” lantern and lit that, leaving
+the bronze lamp in its place.
+
+Soon after that they lost sight of walls to their left for a time,
+although there were no stars, nor any light to suggest the outer
+world--nothing but wind. The wind blew a hurricane.
+
+Their path now was a very narrow ledge formed by a crack that ran
+diagonally down the face of a black cliff on their right. They hugged
+the stone because of a sense of fathomless space above--below--on every
+side but one. The rock wall was the one thing tangible, and the footing
+the crack in it afforded was the gift of God.
+
+The moaning wind rose to a shriek at intervals and made their clothes
+flutter like ghosts' shrouds, and in spite of it King's shirt was
+drenched with sweat, and his fingers ached from clinging as if they were
+on fire. Crawling against the wind along a wider ledge at the top, they
+came to a chasm, crossed by a foot-wide causeway. The wind bowled and
+moaned in it, and the futile lantern rays only suggested unimaginable,
+things--death the least of them.
+
+“Art thou afraid?” asked Ismail, holding the lantern to King's face.
+
+“Kuch dar nahin hai!” he answered. “There is no such thing as fear!”
+
+It was a bold answer, and Ismail laughed, knowing well that neither of
+them believed a word of it at that moment. Only, each thought better
+of the other, that the one should have cared to ask, and that the other
+should be willing to give the lie to a fear that crawled and could be
+felt. Too many men are willing to admit they are afraid. Too many would
+rather condemn and despise than ask and laugh. But it is on the edges of
+eternity that men find each other out, and sympathize.
+
+Ismail went down on his hands and knees, lifting the lantern along a
+foot at a time in front of him and carrying it in his teeth by the bail
+the last part of the way. It seemed like an hour before he stood up,
+nearly a hundred yards away on the far side, and yelled for King to
+follow.
+
+The wind snatched the yells away, but the waving lantern beckoned him,
+and King knelt down in the dark. It happened that he laid his hand on a
+loose stone, the size of his head, near the edge. He shoved it over and
+listened. He listened for a minute but did not hear it strike anything,
+and the shudder, that he could not repress, came from the middle of his
+backbone and spread outward through each fiber of his being. If he had
+delayed another second his courage would have failed; he began at once
+to crawl to where Ismail stood swinging the light.
+
+There was room on the ledge for his knees and no more. Toes and fingers
+were overside. He sat down as on horseback, and transferred both
+slippers to his pockets, and then went forward again with bare feet,
+waiting whenever the wind snatched at him with redoubled fury, to lean
+against it and grip the rock with numb fingers. Ismail swung the lamp,
+for reasons best known to himself, and half-way over King sat astride
+the ridge again to shout to him to hold it still. But Ismail did not
+understand him.
+
+“Khinjan graves are deep!” he howled back. “Fear and the shadow of death
+are one!”
+
+He swung the lamp even more violently, as if it were a charm that could
+exorcise fear and bring a man over safely. The shadows danced until
+his brain reeled, and King swore he would thrash the fool as soon as he
+could reach him. He lay belly-downward on the rock and crawled like an
+insect the remainder of the way.
+
+And as if aware of his intention Ismail started to hurry on while
+there was yet a yard or two to crawl, and anger not being a load worth
+carrying, nor revenge a thing permitted to interfere with the sirkar's
+business, King let both die.
+
+Hunted by the wind, they ran round a bold shoulder of cliff into another
+black-dark tunnel. There the wind died, swallowed in a hundred fissures,
+but the track grew worse and steeper until they had to cling with both
+hands and climb and now and then Ismail set the lantern on a ledge
+and lowered his girdle to help King up. Sometimes he stood on King's
+shoulder in order to reach a higher level. They climbed for an hour and
+dropped at last panting, on a ledge, after squeezing themselves under
+the corner of a boulder.
+
+The lantern light shone on a tiny trickle of cold water, and there
+Ismail drank deep, like a bull, before signing to King to imitate him.
+
+“A thirsty throat and a crazy head are one,” he counseled. “A man needs
+wit and a wet tongue who would talk with her!”
+
+“Where is she?” asked King, when he had finished drinking.
+
+“Go and look!”
+
+Ismail gave him a sudden shove, that sent him feet first forward over
+the edge. He fell a distance rather greater than his own height,
+to another ledge and stood there looking up. He could see Ismail's
+red-rimmed eyes blinking down at him in the lantern light, but suddenly
+the Afridi blew the lamp out, and then the darkness became solid.
+Thought itself left off less than a yard away.
+
+“Ismail!” he whispered. But Ismail did not answer him.
+
+He faced about, leaning against the rock, with the flat of both hands
+pressed tight against it for the sake of its company; and almost at once
+he saw a little bright red light glowing in the distance. It might have
+been a hundred yards, and it might have been a mile away below him; it
+was perfectly impossible to judge, for the darkness was not measurable.
+
+“Flowers turn to the light!” droned Ismail's voice above sententiously,
+and turning, he thought he could see red eyes peering over the rock. He
+jumped, and made a grab for the flowing beard that surely must be below
+them, but he missed.
+
+“Little fish swim to the light!” droned Ismail. “Moths fly to the light!
+Who is a man that he should know less than they?”
+
+He turned again and stared at the light. Dimly, very vaguely be could
+make out that a causeway led downward from almost where he stood. He was
+convinced that should he try to climb back Ismail would merely reach out
+a hand and shove him down again, and there was no sense in being put to
+that indignity. He decided to go forward, for there was even less sense
+in standing still.
+
+“Come with me! Come along, Ismail!” he called.
+
+“Allah! Hear him! Nay, nay, nay! Who was it said a little while ago,
+'There is no such thing as fear!' I am afraid, but thou and I are two
+men! Go thou alone!”
+
+Reason is a man's only dependable faculty. Reason told him that at a
+word from Yasmini he would have been flung into “Earth's Drink” hours
+ago. Therefore, added reason, why should she forego that spectacular
+opportunity when his death would have amused Khinjan's thousands, only
+to kill him now in the dark alone? He had treated a few dozen sick men,
+surely she had not been afraid to offend them. Had she not dared forbid
+the sick coming to him altogether? “Forward!” says Cocker, in at least a
+dozen places. “Go forward and find out! Better a bed in hell than a seat
+on the horns of a dilemma! Forward!”
+
+There was no sound now anywhere. He stretched a leg downward and felt
+a rock two or three feet lower down, and the sound of his slipper sole
+touching it, being the only noise, made the short hair rise on the back
+of his neck. Then he took himself, so to speak, by the hand and went
+forward and downward, for action is the only curb imagination knows.
+
+He forgot to count his pulse and judge how long it took him to descend
+that causeway in the dark. It was not so very rough, nor so very
+dangerous, but of course he only knew that fact afterward. He had to
+grope his way inch by inch, trusting to sense of touch and the British
+army's everlasting luck, with an eye all the while on a red light that
+was something like the glow through hell's keyhole.
+
+When he reached bottom, after perhaps twenty minutes, and stood at last
+on comparatively level rock, his legs were trembling from tension, and
+he had to sit down while he stretched them out and rested. The light
+still looked a quarter of a mile away, although that was guesswork. It
+made scarcely more impression on the surrounding darkness than one coal
+glowing in a cellar. The silence began to make his head ache.
+
+He got up and started forward, but just as he did that he thought he
+heard a footstep. He suspected Ismail might be following after all.
+
+“Ismail!” he called, trying to peer through the dark.
+
+But all the darkness had its home there. He could not even see his own
+hand stretched out. His own voice made him jump; after a second's pause
+it began to crack and rattle from wall to wall and from roof to floor,
+until at last the echoing word became one again and died with a hiss
+somewhere in the bowels of the world--Mbisssss!--like the sound of hot
+iron being plunged into a blacksmith's trough with a little after-murmur
+of complaining water.
+
+But then he was sure he heard a footstep! He faced about; and now there
+were two red lights where there had been only one. They seemed rather
+nearer, perhaps because there were two of them.
+
+“Hullo, King sahib!” said a voice he recognized; and he choked. He felt
+that if he had coughed his heart would have lain on the floor!
+
+“Are you afraid, King sahib?” said the Rangar Rewa Gunga's voice, and
+he took a step forward to be closer to his questioner. He found himself
+beside a rock, looking up at the Rangar's turban, that peered over the
+top of it. He could dimly make out the Rangar's dark eyes.
+
+“I would be afraid if I were you!”
+
+Rewa Gunga flashed a little electric torch into his eyes, but after
+a few seconds he shifted it so that both their faces could be seen,
+although the Rangar's only very faintly.
+
+“I have come to warn you!”
+
+“Very good of you, I'm sure!” said King.
+
+“If she knew I were here, she would jolly well have my liver nailed to a
+wall! I come to advise you to go back!”
+
+“Have they taken Ali Masjid Fort?” King asked him.
+
+“Never mind, sahib, but listen! I have brought her bracelet! I stole it!
+She stole it from you, and I stole it back! Take it! Put it on and wear
+it! Use it as a passport out of Khinjan Caves--for no man dare touch you
+while you wear it--and as a passport down the Khyber into India! Go back
+to India and stay there! Take it and go! Quick! Take it!”
+
+“No, thanks!” said King.
+
+The Rangar laughed mirthlessly, shifting the light a little as King
+stepped aside to get a better view of him. He held the torch more
+cunningly than a Spanish lady holds a fan.
+
+“All Englishmen are fools--most of them stiff-necked fools,” he
+asserted. “Bah! Do you think I do not know? Do you think anything
+is hidden from her? I know--and she knows--that you think you have a
+surprise in store for her! You think you will go to her, and she will
+say, 'King sahib, why did you throw that head into the river, and put me
+in danger from my men?' And you will say, will you not, 'Princess, that
+was my brother's head!'? Was that not what you intended? Is it not true?
+Does she not know it? She knows more than you know, King sahib! Because
+you showed me certain little courtesies, I have come to warn you to run
+away!”
+
+“Do you suppose she knows you are here?” King asked, and the Rangar
+laughed.
+
+“If she knows so much, and is able to read my mind from a distance,
+where does she suppose you are?” King insisted.
+
+The Rangar laughed again, leaning his chin on both fists and switching
+out the light.
+
+“Perhaps she sent me to warn you!”
+
+“Well,” said King, “my brother commanded at Ali Masjid Fort. There are
+things I must ask her. How did she know that head was my brother's? What
+part had she in taking it from his shoulders? What did she mean by that
+song of hers?”
+
+The Rangar chuckled softly.
+
+“There are no fools in the world like Englishmen! Listen! You are being
+offered life and liberty! Here is the key to both!”
+
+He made the gold bracelet ring on the rock by way of explanation.
+
+“Take the key and go!”
+
+“No!” said King.
+
+“Very well, sahib! Hear the other side of it! Beyond those two red
+lights there is a curtain. This side of that curtain you are Athelstan
+King of the Khyber Rifles, or Kurram Khan, or whatever you care to call
+yourself. Beyond it, you are what she calls you! Choose!”
+
+King did not answer, so he continued after a pause.
+
+“You shall pass behind that curtain, if you insist. Beyond it you shall
+know what she knows about Ali Masjid and your brother's head! You shall
+know all that she knows! There shall be no secrets between you and her!
+She shall translate the meaning of her song to you! But you shall never
+come out again King of the Khyber Rifles, or Kurram Khan! If you ever
+come out again, it shall be as you never dreamed, bearing arms you never
+saw yet, and you shall cut with your own hand the ties that bind you to
+England! Choose!”
+
+“I chose long ago,” said King.
+
+“Are the gentle English never serious?” the Rangar asked. “Will you not
+understand that if you pass that curtain you shall know all things
+that Yasmini knows, but that you shall cease to be yourself?
+Cease--to--be--yourself! Is my meaning clear?”
+
+“Not in the least,” said King, “but I hope mine is!”
+
+“You will go forward?”
+
+“Yes,” said King.
+
+Rewa Gunga made no answer to that, although King waited for an answer.
+For about a minute there was no sound at all, except the beating of
+King's heart. Then he moved to try and see the Rangar's turban above the
+rock. He could not see it. He found a niche in the rock, set his foot
+in it and mounted three or four feet, until his head was level with the
+top. The Rangar was gone!
+
+He listened for two or three minutes, but the silence began to make his
+head ache again; so he stooped to feel the floor with his hand before
+deciding to go forward. There was no mistaking the finish given by the
+tread of countless feet. He was on a highway, and there are not often
+pitfalls where so many feet have been.
+
+For all that he went forward as a certain Agag once did, and it was many
+minutes before he could see a curtain glowing blood-red in the light
+behind the two lamps, at the top of a flight of ten stone steps. It
+was peculiar to him and to his service that he counted the steps before
+going nearer.
+
+When he went quite close he saw carpet down the middle of the steps,
+so ancient that the stone showed through in places; all the pattern,
+supposing it ever had any, was worn or faded away. Carpet and steps
+glowed red too. His own face, and the hands he held in front of him
+were red-hot-poker color. Yet outside the little ellipse of light the
+darkness looked like a thing to lean against, and the silence was so
+intense that he could hear the arteries singing by his ears.
+
+He saw the curtains move slightly, apparently in a little puff of wind
+that made the lamps waver. He was very nearly sure he heard a footfall
+beyond the curtains and a tinkle--as of a tiny silver bell, or a jewel
+striking against another one.
+
+He kicked his slippers off, because there are no conditions under which
+bad manners ever are good policy. Wide history and Cocker's famous code.
+Then he walked up the steps without treading on the carpet, because
+living scorpions have been known to be placed under carpets on purpose
+on occasion. And at the top, being a Secret Service man, he stooped to
+examine the lamps.
+
+They were bronze, cast, polished and graved. All round the circumference
+of each bowl were figures in half-relief, representing a woman dancing.
+She was the woman of the knife-hilt, and of the lamps in the arena! She
+looked like Yasmini! Only she could not be Yasmini because these lamps
+were so ancient and so rare that he had never seen any in the least like
+them, although he had visited most of the museums of the East.
+
+Both lamps were alike, for he crossed over to make sure and took each in
+his hands in turn. But no two figures of the dance were alike on
+either. It was the same woman dancing, but the artist had chosen twenty
+different poses with which to immortalize his skill, and hers. Both
+lamps burned sweet oil with a wick, and each had a chimney of horn, not
+at all unlike a modern lamp-chimney. The horn was stained red.
+
+As he set the second lamp down he became aware of a subtle interesting
+smell, and memory took back at once to Yasmini's room in the Chandni
+Chowk in Delhi where he had smelled it first. It was the peculiar scent
+he had been told was Yasmini's own--a blend of scents, like a chord of
+music, in which musk did not predominate.
+
+He took three strides and touched the curtains, discovering now for the
+first time that there were two of them, divided down the middle. They
+were about eight feet high, and each three feet wide, of leather, and
+though they looked old as the “Hills” themselves the leather was supple
+as good cloth. They had once been decorated with figures in gold leaf,
+but only a little patch of yellow here and there remained to hint at
+faded glories.
+
+He decided to remember his manners again, and at least to make
+opportunity for an invitation.
+
+“Kurram Khan hai!” he announced, forgetting the echo. But the echo was
+the only answer. It cackled at him, cracking back and forth down the
+cavern to die with a groan in illimitable darkness.
+
+“Kurram-urram-urram-urram-urram-ahn-hai! Urram-urram-urram-urram-ahn-hai!
+Urram-urram-urram-ah-hh-ough-ah!”
+
+There was no sound beyond the curtains. No answer. Only he thought the
+strange scent grew stronger. He decided to go forward. With his heart in
+his mouth he parted the curtains with both hands, startled by the sharp
+jangle of metal rings on a rod.
+
+So he stood, with arms outstretched, staring--staring--staring--with
+eyes skilled swiftly to take in details, but with a brain that tried to
+explain--formed a hundred wild suggestions--and then reeled. He was face
+to face with the unexplainable--the riddle of Khinjan Caves.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIII
+
+
+
+     Grand was thy goal! Thy vision new!
+             Ave, Caesar!
+     Conquest?  Ends of Earth thy view?
+             Ave, Caesar!
+     To sow--to reap--to play God's game?
+     How many Caesars did that same
+     Until the great, grim Reaper came!
+     Who ploughs with death shall garner rue,
+     And under all skies is nothing new.
+             Vale, Caesar!
+
+
+Telling the story afterward King never made any effort to describe
+his own sensations. It was surely enough to state what he saw, after a
+breathless climb among the rat-runs of a mountain with his imagination
+fired already by what had happened in the Cavern of Earth's Drink.
+
+The leather curtains slipped through his fingers and closed behind him
+with the clash of rings on a rod. But he was beyond being startled. He
+was not really sure he was in the world. He knew he was awake, and he
+knew he was glad he had left his shoes outside. But he was not certain
+whether it was the twentieth century, or fifty-five B. C., or earlier
+yet; or whether time had ceased. Very vividly in that minute there
+flashed before his mind Mark Twain's suggestion of the Transposition of
+Epochs.
+
+The place where he was did not look like a cave, but a palace chamber,
+for the rock walls had been trimmed square and polished smooth; then
+they had been painted pure white, except for a wide blue frieze, with
+a line of gold-leaf drawn underneath it. And on the frieze, done in
+gold-leaf too, was the Grecian lady of the lamps, always dancing. There
+were fifty or sixty figures of her, no two the same.
+
+A dozen lamps were burning, set in niches cut in the walls at measured
+intervals. They were exactly like the two outside, except that their
+horn chimneys were stained yellow instead of red, suffusing everything
+in a golden glow.
+
+Opposite him was a curtain, rather like that through which he had
+entered. Near to the curtain was a bed, whose great wooden posts were
+cracked with age. And it was at the bed he stared, with eyes that took
+in every detail but refused to believe.
+
+In spite of its age it was spread with fine new linen. Richly
+embroidered, not very ancient Indian draperies hung down from it to
+the floor on either side. On it, above the linen, a man and a woman lay
+hand-in-hand; and the woman was so exactly like Yasmini, even to her
+clothing, and her naked feet, that it was not possible for a man to be
+self-possessed.
+
+They both seemed asleep. It was as if Yasmini, weary from the dancing,
+had laid herself to sleep beside her lord. But who was he? And why did
+he wear Roman armor? And why was there no guard to keep intruders out?
+
+It was minutes before he satisfied himself that the man's breast did not
+rise and fall under the bronze armor and that the woman's jeweled gauzy
+stuff was still. Imagination played such tricks with him that in the
+stillness he imagined he heard breathing.
+
+After he was sure they were both dead, he went nearer, but it was a
+minute yet before he knew the woman was not she. At first a wild thought
+possessed him that she had killed herself.
+
+The only thing to show who he had been were the letters S. P. Q. R. on a
+great plumed helmet, on a little table by the bed. But she was the woman
+of the lamp-bowls and the frieze. A life-size stone statue in a corner
+was so like her, and like Yasmini too, that it was difficult to decide
+which of the two it represented.
+
+She had lived when he did, for her fingers were locked in his. And he
+had lived two thousand years ago, because his armor was about as old as
+that, and for proof that he had died in it part of his breast had turned
+to powder inside the breastplate. The rest of his body was whole and
+perfectly preserved.
+
+Stern, handsome in a high-beaked Roman way, gray on the temples,
+firm-lipped, he lay like an emperor in harness. But the pride and
+resolution on his face were outdone by the serenity of hers. Very surely
+those two had been lovers.
+
+Something--he could not decide what--about the man's appearance kept him
+staring for ten minutes, holding his breath unconsciously and letting
+it out in little silent gasps. It annoyed him that he could not pin down
+the elusive thing; and when he went on presently to be curious about
+more tangible things, it was only to be faced with the unexplainable at
+every turn.
+
+How had the bodies been preserved, for instance? They were perfect,
+except for that one detail of the man's breast. The air was full of the
+perfume he had learned to recognize as Yasmini's, but there was no sniff
+about the bodies of pitch or bitumen, or of any other chemical. Nor
+was there any sign of violence about them, or means of telling how they
+died, or when, except for the probable date of the man's armor.
+
+Both of them looked young and healthy--the woman younger than
+thirty--twenty-five at a guess--and the man perhaps forty, perhaps
+forty-five.
+
+He bent over them. Every stitch of the man's clothing had decayed in the
+course of centuries, so that his armor rested on the naked skin, except
+for a dressed leather kilt about his middle. The leather was as old as
+the curtains at the entrance, and as well preserved.
+
+But the woman's silken clothing was as new as the bedding; and that was
+so new that it had been woven in Belfast, Ireland, by machinery and bore
+the mark of the firm that made it!
+
+Yet, they both died at about the same time, or how could their fingers
+have been interlaced? And some of the jewelry on the woman's clothes was
+very ancient as well as priceless.
+
+He looked closer at the fingers for signs of force and suddenly caught
+his breath. Under the woman's flimsy sleeve was a wrought gold
+bracelet, smaller than that one he himself had worn in Delhi and up the
+Khyber--exactly like the little one that Yasmini wore on her wrist in
+the Cavern of Earth's Drink! He raised the loose sleeve to look more
+closely at it.
+
+The sleeve overlay the man's forearm, and the movement laid bare another
+bracelet, on the man's right wrist. Size for size, this was the same as
+the one that had been stolen from himself.
+
+Memory prompted him. He felt its outer edge with a finger-nail. There
+was the little nick that he had made in the soft gold when he struck it
+against the cell bars in the jail at the Mir Khan Palace!
+
+That put another thought in his head. It was less than two hours since
+Yasmini danced in the arena. It might well be much less than that since
+she had taken off her bracelets. He laid a finger on the dead man's
+stone-cold hand and let it rest so for a minute. Then, running it slowly
+up the wrist, he touched the gold. It was warm. He repeated the test on
+the woman's wrist. Hers was warm, too. Both bracelets had been worn by a
+living being within an hour--
+
+“Probably within minutes!”
+
+He muttered and frowned in thought, and then suddenly jumped backward.
+The leather curtain near the bed had moved on its bronze rod.
+
+“Aren't they dears?” a voice said in English behind him. “Aren't they
+sweet?”
+
+He had jumped so as to face about, and somebody laughed at him. Yasmini
+stood not two arms' lengths away, lovelier than the dead woman because
+of the merry life in her, young and warm, aglow, but looking like
+the dead woman and the woman of the frieze--the woman of the
+lamp--bowls--the statue--come to life, speaking to him in English more
+sweetly than if it had been her mother tongue. The English abuse their
+language. Yasmini caressed it and made it do its work twice over.
+
+Being dressed as a native, he salaamed low. Knowing him for what he was,
+she gave him the senna-stained tips of her warm fingers to kiss, and he
+thought she trembled when he touched them. But a second later she had
+snatched them away and was treating him to raillery.
+
+“Man of pills and blisters!” she said, “tell me how those bodies are
+preserved! Spill knowledge from that learned skull of thine!”
+
+He did not answer. He never shone in conversation at any time, having
+made as many friends as enemies by saying nothing until the spirit moves
+him. But she did not know that yet.
+
+“If I knew for certain why those two did not turn to worms,” she went
+on, “almost I would choose to die now, while I am beautiful! Think
+of the fogy museum men!” (She called them by a far less edifying name,
+really, for the East is frank in that way, especially in its use of
+other tongues.) “What would they say, think you, King sahib, if they
+found us two dead beside those two? Would not that be a mystery? Don't
+you love mysteries? Speak, man, speak! Has Khinjan struck you dumb?”
+
+But he did not speak. He was staring at her arm, where two whitish marks
+on the skin betrayed that bracelets had been.
+
+“Oh, those! They are theirs. I would not rob the dead, or the gods would
+turn on me. I robbed you, instead, while you slept. Fie, King sahib,
+while you slept!”
+
+But her steel did not strike on flint. It was her eyes that flashed. He
+would have done better to have seemed ashamed, for then he might have
+fooled her, at least for a while. But having judged himself, he did
+not care a fig for her judgment of him. She realized that instantly and
+having found a tool that would not work, discarded it for a better one.
+She grew confidential.
+
+“I borrow them,” she explained, “but I put them back. I take them for
+so many days, and when the day comes--the gods like us to be exact! Once
+there was an Englishman to whom I lent the larger one, and he refused
+to return it. He wanted it to wear, to bring him luck. Collins, of the
+Gurkhas. A cobra bit him.”
+
+King's eyes changed, for Collins of the Gurkhas had died in his two
+arms, saying never a word. He had always wondered why the native who
+ran in to kill the cobra had run away again and left Collins lying there
+after seeming to shake hands with him. Yasmini, watching his eyes and
+reading his memory, missed nothing.
+
+“You saw?” she said excitedly. “You remember? Then you understand! You
+yourself were near death when I took the bracelet last night. The time
+was up. I would have stabbed you if you had tried to prevent me!”
+
+Now he spoke at last and gave her a first glimpse of an angle of his
+mind she had not suspected.
+
+“Princess,” he said. He used the word with the deference some men can
+combine with effrontery, so that very tenderness has barbs. “You might
+have had that thing back if you had sent a messenger for it at any time.
+A word by a servant would have been enough.
+
+“You could never have reached Khinjan then!” she retorted. Her eyes
+flashed again, but his did not waver.
+
+“Princess,” he said, “why speak of what you don't know?”
+
+He thought she would strike like a snake, but she smiled at him instead.
+And when Yasmini has smiled on a man he has never been just the same man
+afterward. He knows more, for one thing. He has had a lesson in one of
+the finer arts.
+
+“I will speak of what I do know,” she said. “No, there is no need. Look!
+Look!”
+
+She pointed at the bed--at the man on the bed--fingers locked in those
+of a woman who looked so like herself.
+
+“You see--yet you do not see! Men are blind! Men look into a mirror, and
+see only whiskers they forgot to shave the day before. Women look once
+and then remember! Look again!”
+
+He looked, knowing well there was something to be understood, that
+stared him in the face. But for the life of him he could not determine
+question or answer.
+
+“What is in your bosom?” she asked him.
+
+He put his hand to his shirt.
+
+“Draw it out!” she said, as a teacher drills a child.
+
+He drew out the gold-hilted knife with the bronze blade, with which a
+man had meant to murder him. He let it lie on the palm of his hand
+and looked from it to her and back again. The hilt might have been a
+portrait of her modeled from the life.
+
+“Here is another like it,” she said, stepping to the bedside. She drew
+back the woman's dress at the bosom and showed a knife exactly like that
+in King's hand. “One lay on her bosom and one on his when I found them!”
+ she said. “Now, think again!”
+
+He did think, of thirty thousand possibilities, and of one impossible
+idea that stood up prominent among them all and insisted on seeming the
+only likely one.
+
+“I saw the knife in your bosom last night,” she said, “and laughed so
+that I nearly wakened you. Man! Are you stupid? Will that ready wit of
+yours not work? Have I bewildered you? Is it my perfume? My eyes? My
+jewels? What is it? Think, man! Think!”
+
+But if she wanted to make him guess aloud for her amusement she was
+wasting time. Had he known the answer he would have held his tongue. As
+he did not know it, he had all the more reason to wait indefinitely, if
+need be. But interminable waiting was no part of her plan. Words were
+welling out of her.
+
+“I gave a fool that knife to use, because he was afraid. It gave him
+courage. When he failed I knew it by telegram, and I sent another fool
+before the wires were cold, to kill him in the police-station cell for
+having failed. One fool has been stabbed and the English will hang the
+other. Then I sent twenty men to turn India inside out and find the
+knife again, for like the bracelets it has its place. And that is why I
+laughed. They are hunting. They will hunt until I call them off!”
+
+“Why didn't you take it with the bracelet?” King asked her, holding it
+out. “Take it now. I don't want it.”
+
+She accepted it and laid it on the man's bronze armor. Then, however,
+she resumed it and played with it.
+
+“Look again!” she said. “Think and look again!”
+
+He looked, and he knew now. But he still preferred that she should tell
+him, and his lips shut tight.
+
+“Why, having ordered your death, did I countermand the order when your
+life had been attempted once? Why, as soon as Rewa Gunga had seen you,
+did I order you to be aided in every way?”
+
+Still he did not answer, although the solution to that riddle, too,
+was beginning to dawn on his consciousness. He suspected she would be
+annoyed if he deprived her of the fun of telling him, so that by being
+silent he played both her game and his own.
+
+“Why did I order your death in the first place?”
+
+The answer to that was obvious, but she answered it for him.
+
+“Because, since the sirkar insisted that one man must come with me to
+Khinjan, I preferred a fool, who could be lost on the way. I knew your
+reputation. I never heard any man call you a fool.”
+
+She laughed. He nodded. She was obviously telling truth.
+
+“Can you guess why I changed my mind about you--wise man?”
+
+She looked from him to the man on the bed and back to him again. Having
+solved her riddle, King had leisure to be interested in her eyes, and
+watched them analytically, like a jeweler appraising diamonds. They were
+strangely reminiscent, but much more changeable and colorful than any he
+had ever seen. They had the baffling trick of changing while he watched
+them.
+
+“Having sent a man to kill you, why did I cease to want you killed?
+Instead of losing you on the way to Khinjan, why did I run risks to
+protect you after you reached here? Why did I save your life in the
+Cavern of Earth's Drink to-night? You do not know yet? Then I will tell
+you something else you do not know. I was in Delhi when you were! I
+watched and listened while you and Rewa Gunga talked in my house! I was
+in Rewa Gunga's carriage on the train that he took and you did not! I
+have learned at first hand that you are not a fool. But that was not
+enough! You had to be three things--clever and brave and one other. The
+one other you are! Brave you have proved yourself to be! Clever you
+must be, to trick your way into Khinjan Caves, even with Ismail at your
+elbow! That is why I saved your life--because you are those two things
+and--and--one other!”
+
+She snatched a mirror from a little ivory table--a modern mirror--bad
+glass, bad art, bad workmanship, but silver warranted.
+
+“Look in it and then at him!” she ordered.
+
+But he did not need to look. The man on the bed was not so much like
+himself as the woman was like her, but the resemblance seemed to grow
+under his eyes, as such things do. It was helped out by the stain his
+brother had applied to his face in the Khyber. King was the taller
+and the younger by several years, but the noses were the same, and the
+wrinkled fore-heads; both men had the same firm mouth; both looked like
+Romans.
+
+“How did you get that scar?”
+
+She came closer and took his hand, holding it in both hers, and he felt
+the same thrill Samson knew. He steeled himself as Samson did not.
+
+“A Mahsudi got me with a martini at long range in the blockade of 1902,”
+ he said dryly.
+
+“Look! Did he get his from a spear or from an arrow?”
+
+Almost in the same spot, also on the dead man's left hand, was a scar
+so nearly like it that it needed a third and a fourth glance to tell the
+difference. They both bent over the bed to see it, and she laid a
+hand on his shoulder. Touch and scent and confidence, all three were
+bewitching; all three were calculated, too! He could have killed her,
+and she knew he could have killed her, just as she knew he would not.
+Yet what right had she to know it!
+
+“Athelstan!”
+
+She pronounced his given name as if she loved the word, standing
+straight again and looking into his eyes. There were high lights in hers
+that outgleamed the diamonds on her dress.
+
+“Your gods and mine have done this, Athelstan. When the gods combine
+they lay plans well indeed!”
+
+“I only know one God,” he answered simply, as a man speaks of the deep
+things in his heart.
+
+“I know of many! They love me! They shall love you, too! Many are better
+than one! You shall learn to know my gods, for we are to be partners,
+you and I!”
+
+She laughed at him, looking like a goddess herself, but he frowned. And
+the more he frowned the better she seemed to like him.
+
+“Partners in what, Princess?”
+
+“Thou--Ismail dubbed thee Ready o' wit!--answer thine own question!”
+
+She took his hand again, her eyes burning with excitement and mysticism
+and ambition like a fever. She seemed to take more than physical
+possession of him.
+
+“What brought them here? Tell me that!” she demanded, pointing to the
+bed. “You think he brought, her? I tell you she was the spur that drove
+him! Is it a wonder that men called her the 'Heart of the Hills'? I
+found them ten years ago and clothed her and put new linen on their bed,
+for the old was all rags and dust. There have always been hundreds--and
+sometimes thousands--who knew the secret of Khinjan Caves, but this has
+been a secret within a secret. Some one, who knew the secret before I,
+sawed those bracelets through and fitted hinges and clasps. The men you
+saw in the Cavern of Earth's Drink have no doubt I am the 'Heart of the
+Hills' come to life! They shall know thee as Him within a little while!”
+
+She held his hand a little tighter and pressed closer to him, laughing
+softly. He stood as if made of iron, and that only made her laugh the
+more.
+
+“Tales of the 'Heart of the Hills' have puzzled the Raj, haven't they,
+these many years? They sent me to find the source of them. Me! They
+chose well! There are not many like me! I have found this one dead woman
+who was like me. And in ten years, until you came, I have found no man
+like Him!”
+
+She tried to look into his eyes, but he frowned straight in front of
+him. His native costume and Rangar turban did not make him seem any less
+a man. His jowl, that was beginning to need shaving, was as grim and
+as satisfying as the dead Roman's. She stroked his left hand with soft
+fingers.
+
+“I used to think I knew how to dance!” she laughed--“For ten years I
+have taken those pictures of her for my model and have striven to learn
+what she knew. I have surpassed her! I used to think I knew how to amuse
+myself with men's dreams--until I found this! Then I dreamed on my own
+account! My dream was true, my warrior! You have come! Our hour has
+come!”
+
+She tugged at his hand. He was hers, soul and harness, if outward signs
+could prove it.
+
+“Come!” she said. “Is this my hospitality? You are weary and hungry.
+Come!”
+
+She led him by the hand, for it would have needed brute force to pry her
+fingers loose. She drew aside the leather curtain that hung on a bronze
+rod near the bed, led him through it, and let it clash to again behind
+them.
+
+Now they were in the dark together, and it was not comprehended in her
+scheme of things to let circumstance lie fallow. She pressed his hand,
+and sighed, and then hurried, whispering tender words he could scarcely
+catch. When they burst together through a curtain at the other end of
+a passage in the rock, his skin was red under the tan and for the first
+time her eyes refused to meet his.
+
+“Why did they choose that cave to sleep in?” she asked him. “Is not this
+a better one? Who laid them there?”
+
+He stared about. They were in a great room far more splendid than the
+first. There was a fountain in the center splashing in the midst of
+flowers. They were cut flowers. The “Hills” must have been scoured for
+them within a day.
+
+There were great cushioned couches all about and two thrones made of
+ivory and gold. Between two couches was a table, laden with golden
+plates and a golden jug, on pure white linen. There were two goblets of
+beaten gold and knives with golden handles and bronze blades. The whole
+room seemed to be drenched in the scent Yasmini favored, and there was
+the same frieze running round all four walls, with the woman depicted on
+it dancing.
+
+“Come, we shall eat!” she said, leading him by the hand to a couch. She
+took the one facing him, and they lay like two Romans of the Empire with
+the table in between.
+
+She struck a golden gong then, and a native woman came in who stared at
+King as if she had seen him before and did not like him. Except for the
+jewels, she was dressed exactly like Yasmini, which is to say that her
+gauzy stuff was all but transparent. But Yasmini uses raiment as she
+does her eyes; it is part of her, and of her art. The maid, who would
+have shone among many women, looked stiff and dull by contrast.
+
+“I trust no Hill woman--they are cattle with human tongues,” Yasmini
+said, frowning at the maid. “Even in Delhi there was only this one woman
+whom I dared bring here with me. You brought my men-servants! They
+are loyal, but as clumsy as the bears in their cold 'Hills'! Rewa Gunga
+brought me this one disguised as a man--you remember?”
+
+She nodded to the servant, who clapped her hands. At once came a stream
+of Hillmen, robed in white, who carried sherbet in bottles cooled in
+snow and dishes fragrant with hot food. He recognized his own prisoners
+from the Mir Khan Palace jail, and nodded to them as they set the things
+down under the maid's direction. When they had done the woman chased
+them out and came and stood behind Yasmini with a fan, for though it was
+not too hot, she liked to have her golden hair blown into movement.
+
+“My cook was a viceroy's,” she said, beginning to eat. “He killed an
+officer who said the curry had pig's fat in it. That made him free of
+Khinjan but of not many other places! I have promised him a swim in
+Earth's Drink when he ever forgets his art!”
+
+King ate, because a man can not talk and eat at once. It was true that
+he was hungry, that hunger is a piquant sauce, and that artist was an
+adjective too mild to apply to the cook. But the other reason was his
+chief one. Yasmini ate daintily, as if only to keep him company.
+
+“You would rather have wine?” she asked suddenly. “All sahibs drink
+wine. Bring wine!” she ordered.
+
+But King shook his head, and she looked pleased.
+
+He had thought she would be disappointed. When he had finished eating
+she drove the maid away with a sharp word; and when King jumped to his
+feet she led him toward the gold-and-ivory thrones, taking her seat on
+one of them and bidding him adjust the footstool.
+
+“Would I might offer you the other!” she said, merrily enough, “but you
+must sit at my feet until our hearts are one!”
+
+It was clear that she took no delight in easy victories, for she laughed
+aloud at the quizzical expression on his face. He guessed that if she
+could have conquered him at the first attempt a day would have found her
+weary of him; there was deliberate wisdom in his plan for the present to
+seem to let her win by little inches at a time. He reasoned that so she
+would tell him more than if he defied her outright.
+
+He brought an ivory footstool and set it about a yard away from her
+waxen toes. And she, watching him with burning eyes, wound tresses of
+her hair around the golden dagger handle, making her jewels glitter with
+each movement.
+
+“You pleased me by refusing wine,” she said. “You please me--oh, you
+please me! Christians drink wine and eat beef and pig-meat. Ugh! Hindu
+and Muslim both despise them, having each a little understanding of his
+own. The gods of India, who are the only real gods, what do they think
+of it all! They have been good to the English, but they have had no
+thanks. They will stand aside now and watch a greater jihad than the
+world has ever seen! And the Hindu, who holds the cow sacred, will not
+support Christians who hold nothing sacred, against Muhammadans who
+loathe the pig! Christianity has failed! The English must go down with
+it--just as Rome went down when she dabbled in Christianity. Oh, I know
+all about Rome!”
+
+“And the gods of India?” he asked, to keep her to the point now that she
+seemed well started.
+
+He was there to learn, not to teach.
+
+“I know them, too! I know them as nobody else does! They are neither
+Hindu, nor Muhammadan, but are older by a thousand ages than either
+foolishness! I love them, and they love me--as you shall love me, too!
+If they did not love both of us, we would not both be here! We must obey
+them!”
+
+None of the East's amazing ways of courtship are ever tedious. Love
+springs into being on an instant and lives a thousand years inside an
+hour. She left no doubt as to her meaning. She and King were to love,
+as the East knows love, and then the world might have just what they two
+did not care to take from it.
+
+His only possible course as yet was the defensive, and there is no
+defense like silence. He was still.
+
+“The sirkar,” she went on, “the silly sirkar fears that perhaps Turkey
+may enter the war. Perhaps a jihad may be proclaimed. So much for fear!
+I know! I have known for a very long time! And I have not let fear
+trouble me at all!”
+
+Her eyes were on his steadily, and she read no fear in his,
+either, for none was there. In hers he saw ambition--triumph
+already--excitement--the gambler's love of all the hugest risks. Behind
+them burned genius and the devilry that would stop at nothing. As the
+general had told him in Peshawur, she would dare open Hell's gate and
+ride the devil down the Khyber for the fun of it.
+
+“Au diable, diable et demie!” the French say; and like most French
+proverbs it is a wise one. But whence the devil and a half should come
+to thwart her was not obvious.
+
+“I must be a devil and a half,” he told himself, and very nearly
+laughed aloud at the idea. She mistook the sudden humor in his eyes for
+admiration of herself, being used to that from men.
+
+“Listen, while I tell you all from the beginning! The sirkar sent me to
+discover what may be this 'Heart of the Hills' men talk about. I found
+these caves--and this! I told the sirkar a little about the Caves, and
+nothing at all about the Sleepers. But even at that they only believed
+the third of what I said. And I--back in Delhi I bought books--borrowed
+books--sent to Europe for more books--and hired babu Sita Ram to read
+them to me, until his tongue grew dry and swollen and he used
+to fall asleep in a corner. I know all about Rome! Days I
+spent--weeks!--months!--listening to the history of their great Caesar,
+and their little Caesars--of their conquests and their games! It was
+good, and I understood it all! Rome should have been true to the old
+gods, and they would have been true to her! She fell when she fooled
+with Christianity!”
+
+She was speaking dreamily now, with her chin resting on a hand and an
+elbow on the ivory arm of the throne, remembering as she told her story.
+And it meant so much to her, she was so in earnest, that her voice
+conjured up pictures for King to see.
+
+“When I had read enough I came back here to think. I knew enough now
+to be sure that the Sleeper is a Roman, and the 'Heart of the Hills' a
+Grecian maid. She is like me. That is why I know she drove him to make
+an empire, choosing for a beginning these 'Hills' where Rome had never
+penetrated. He found her in Greece. He plunged through Persia to build a
+throne for her! I have seen it all in dreams, and again in the crystal!
+And because I was all alone, I saw that I would need all the skill I
+could learn, and much patience. So I began to learn to dance as she
+danced, using those pictures of her as a model. I have surpassed her! I
+can dance better than she ever did!
+
+“Between times I would go to Delhi and dance there a little, and a
+little in other places--once indeed before a viceroy, and once for the
+king of England--and all men--the king, too!--told me that none in
+the world can dance as I can! And all the while I kept looking for the
+man--the man who should be like the Sleeper, even as I am like her whom
+he loved!
+
+“Many a man--many and many a man I have tried and found wanting! For I
+was impatient in spite of resolutions. I burned to find him at once, and
+begin! But you are the first of all the men I have tested who answered
+all the tests! Languages--he must speak the native tongues. Brave be
+must be--and clever--resembling the Sleeper in appearance. I began to
+think long ago that I must forego that last test, for there was none
+like the Sleeper until you came. And when this world war broke--for it
+is a world war, a world war I tell you!--I thought at last that I must
+manage all alone. And then you came!
+
+“But there were many I tried--many--especially after I abandoned the
+thought that the man must resemble the Sleeper. There was a Prince of
+Germany who came to India on a hunting trip. You remember?”
+
+King pricked his ears and allowed himself to grin, for in common with
+many hundred other men who had been lieutenants at the time, he would
+once have given an ear and an eye to know the truth of that affair. The
+grin transformed his whole appearance, until Yasmini beamed on him.
+
+“I'm listening, Princess!” he reminded her.
+
+“Well--he came--the Prince of Germany--the borrower!”
+
+“Borrower of what, Princess?”
+
+“Of wit! Of brains! Of platitudes! Of reputation! There came a crowd
+with him of such clumsy plunderers, asking such rude questions, that
+even the sirkar could not shut its ears and eyes!
+
+“I did not know all about sahibs in those days. I thought that, although
+this man is what he is, yet he is a prince, and perhaps I can fire him
+with my genius. I could have taught him the native tongues. I thought
+he had ambition, but I learned that he is only greedy. You see, I was
+foolish, not knowing yet that in good time if I am patient my man will
+come to me! But I learned all about Germans--all!
+
+“I offered him India first, then Asia, then the world--even as I now
+offer them to you. The sirkar sent him to see me dance, and he stayed
+to hear me talk. When I saw at last that he has the head and heart of a
+hyena I told him lies. But he, being drunk, told me truths that I have
+remembered.
+
+“Later he sent two of his officers to ask me questions, and they were
+little better than he, although a little better mannered. I told them
+lies, too, and they told me lies, but they told me much that was true.
+
+“Then the prince came again, a last time. And I was weary of him. The
+sirkar was very weary of him too. He offered me money to go to Germany
+and dance for the kaiser in Berlin. He said I will be shown there much
+that will be to my advantage. I refused. He made me other offers. So I
+spat in his face and threw food at him.
+
+“He complained to the sirkar against me, sending one of his high
+officers to demand that I be whipped. So I told the sirkar some--not
+much, indeed, but enough--of the things he and his officers had told
+me. And the sirkar said at once that there was both cholera and bubonic
+plague, and he must go home!
+
+“I have heard--three men told me--that he said he will never rest until
+I have been whipped! But I have heard that his officers laughed behind
+his back. And ever since that time there have always been Germans in
+communication with me. I have had more money from Berlin than would
+bribe the viceroy's council, and I have not once been in the dark about
+Germany's plans--although they have always thought I am in the dark.
+
+“I went on looking for my man--studying all, Germans, English, Turks,
+French--and there was a Frenchman whom I nearly chose--and an American,
+a man who used the strangest words, who laughed at me. I studied Hindu,
+Muslim, Christian, every good-looking fighting man who came my way,
+knowing well that all creeds are one when the gods have named their
+choice.
+
+“There came that old Bull-with-a-beard, Muhammad Anim, and for a time I
+thought he is the man, for he is a man whatever else he is. But I tired
+of him. I called him Bull-with-a-beard, and the 'Hills' took it up and
+mocked him, until the new name stuck. He still thinks he is the man,
+having more strength to hope and more will to will wrongly than any
+man I ever met, except a German. I have even been sure sometimes that
+Muhammad Anim is a German; yet now I am not sure.
+
+“From all the men I met and watched I have learned all they knew! And I
+have never neglected to tell the sirkar sufficient of what men have told
+me, to keep the sirkar pleased with me!
+
+“Nor have I ever played Germany's game--no, no! I have talked with a
+prince of Germany, and I understand too well! Who sups with a boar may
+get good roots to eat, but must endure pigs' feet in the trough! Pigs'
+hides make good saddles; I have used the Germans, as they think they
+have used me! I have used them ruthlessly.
+
+“Knowing all I knew, and being ready except that I had not found my man
+yet, I dallied in India on the eve of war, watching a certain Sikh to
+discover whether he is the man or not. But he lacked imagination, and
+I was caught in Delhi when war broke and the English closed the Khyber
+Pass. Yet I had to come up the Khyber, to reach Khinjan.
+
+“So it was fortunate that I knew of a German plot that I could spoil
+at the last minute. I fooled the Germans by letting the Sikh whom I had
+watched discover it. The Germans still believe me their accomplice--and
+the sirkar was so pleased that I think if I had asked for an English
+peerage they would have answered me soberly. A million dynamite bombs
+was a big haul for the sirkar! My offer to go to Khinjan and keep the
+'Hills' quiet was accepted that same day!
+
+“But what are a million dynamite bombs! Dynamite bombs have been coming
+into Khinjan month by month these three years! Bombs and rifles and
+cartridges! Muhammad Anim's men, whom he trusts because he must, hid it
+all in a cave I showed them, that they think, and he thinks, has only
+one entrance to it. Muhammad Anim sealed it, and he has the key. But I
+have the ammunition!
+
+“There was another way out of that cave, although there is none now,
+for I have blocked it. My men, whom I trust because I know them, carried
+everything out by the back way, and I have it all. I will show it to you
+presently.
+
+“I know all Muhammad Anim's plans. Bull-with-a-beard believes himself a
+statesman, yet he told me all he knows! He has told me how Germany plans
+to draw Turkey in and to force Turkey to proclaim a jihad. As if I did
+not know it first, almost before the Germans knew it! Fools! The jihad
+will recoil on them! It will be like a cobra, striking whoever stirs
+it! A typhoon, smiting right and left! Christianity is doomed, and
+the Germans call themselves Christians! Fools! Rome called herself
+Christian--and where is Rome?
+
+“But we, my warrior, when Muhammad Anim gets the word from Germany and
+gives the sign, and the 'Hills' are afire, and the whole East roars in
+the flame of the jihad--we will put ourselves at the head of that jihad,
+and the East and the world is ours!”
+
+King smiled at her.
+
+“The East isn't very well armed,” he objected. “Mere numbers--”
+
+“Numbers?” She laughed at him. “The West has the West by the throat!
+It is tearing itself! They will drag in America! There will be no armed
+nation with its hands free--and while those wolves fight, other wolves
+shall come and steal the meat! The old gods, who built these caverns in
+the 'Hills,' are laughing! They are getting ready! Thou and I--”
+
+As she coupled him and herself together in one plan she read the changed
+expression of his face--the very quickly passing cloud that even the
+best-trained man can not control.
+
+“I know!” she asserted, sitting upright and coming out of her dream
+to face facts as their master. She looked more lovely now than ever,
+although twice as dangerous. “You are thinking of your brother--of his
+head! That I am a murderess who can never be your friend! Is that not
+so?”
+
+He did not answer, but his eyes may have betrayed something, for
+she looked as if he had struck her. Leaning forward, she held the
+gold-hilted dagger out to him, hilt first.
+
+“Take it and stab me!” she ordered. “Stab--if you blame me for your
+brother's death! I should have known him for your brother if I had come
+on him in the dark!--His head might have come from your shoulders!--You
+were like a man holding up his own head, as I have seen in pictures in a
+book! I would never have killed him!”
+
+Her golden hair fell all about his shoulders, and its scent was not
+intended to be sobering. She ran warm fingers through his hair while she
+held the knife toward him with the other hand.
+
+“Take it and stab!”
+
+“No,” he said.
+
+“No!” she laughed. “No! You are my warrior--my man--my well--beloved!
+You have come to me alone out of all the world! You would no more stab
+me than the gods would forget me!”
+
+Their eyes were on each other's--deep looking into deep.
+
+“Strength!” she said, flinging him away and leaning back to look at him,
+almost as a fed cat stretches in the sunlight. “Courage! Simplicity!
+Directness! Strength I have, too, and courage never failed me, but my
+mind is a river winding in and out, gathering as it goes. I have no
+directness--no simplicity! You go straight from point to point, my
+sending from the gods! I have needed you! Oh, I have needed you so much,
+these many years! And now that you have come you want to hate me because
+you think I killed your brother! Listen--I will tell you all I know
+about your brother.”'
+
+Without a scrap of proof of any kind he knew she was telling truth
+unadorned--or at least the truth as she saw it. Eye to eye, there are
+times when no proof is needed.
+
+“Without my leave, Muhammad Anim sent five hundred men on a foray toward
+the Khyber. Bull-with-a-beard needed an Englishman's head, for proof
+for a spy of his who could not enter Khinjan Caves. They trapped your
+brother outside Ali Masjid with fifty of his men. They took his head
+after a long fight, leaving more than a hundred of their own in payment.
+
+“Bull-with-a-beard was pleased. But he was careless, and I sent my men
+to steal the head from his men. I needed evidence for you. And I swear
+to you--I swear to you by my gods who have brought us two together--that
+I first knew it was your brother's head when you held it up in the
+Cavern of Earth's Drink! Then I knew it could not be anybody else's
+head!”
+
+“Why bid me throw it to them, then?” he asked her, and he was aware of
+her scorn before the words had left his lips.
+
+She leaned back again and looked at him through lowered eyes, as if she
+must study him all anew. She seemed to find it hard to believe that he
+really thought so in the commonplace.
+
+“What is a head to me, or to you--a head with no life in
+it--carrion!--compared to what shall be? Would you have known it was his
+head if you had thrown it to them when I ordered you?”
+
+He understood. Some of her blood was Russian, some Indian.
+
+“A friend is a friend, but a brother is a rival,” says the East, out of
+world-old experience, and in some ways Russia is more eastern than the
+East itself.
+
+“Muhammad Anim shall answer to you for your brother's head!” she said
+with a little nod, as if she were making concessions to a child. “At
+present we need him. Let him preach his jihad, and loose it at the
+right time. After that he will be in the way! You shall name his
+death--Earth's Drink--slow torture--fire! Will that content you?”
+
+“No,” he said, with a dry laugh.
+
+“What more can you ask?”
+
+“Less! My brother died at the head of his men. He couldn't ask more. Let
+Bull-with-a-beard alone.”
+
+She set both elbows on her knees and laid her chin on both hands to
+stare at him again. He began to remember long-forgotten schoolboy lore
+about chemical reagents, that dissolve materials into their component
+parts, such was the magic of her eyes. There were no eyes like hers that
+he had ever seen, although Rewa Gunga's had been something like them.
+Only Rewa Gunga's had not changed so. Thought of the Rangar no sooner
+crossed his mind than she was speaking of him.
+
+“Rewa Gunga met you in the dark, beyond those outer curtains, did he
+not?”
+
+He nodded.
+
+“Did he tell you that if you pass the curtains you shall be told all I
+know?”
+
+He nodded again, and she laughed.
+
+“It would take time to tell you all I know! First, I think I will show
+you things. Afterward you shall ask me questions, and I will answer
+them!”
+
+She stood up, and of course he stood up, too. So, she on the footstool
+of the throne, her eyes and his were on a level. She laid hands on
+his shoulders and looked into his eyes until he could see his own twin
+portraits in hers that were glowing sunset pools. Heart of the Hills?
+The Heart of all the East seemed to burn in her, rebellious!
+
+“Are you believing me?” she asked him.
+
+He nodded, for no man could have helped believing her. As she knew
+the truth, she was telling it to him, as surely as she was doing her
+skillful best to mesmerize him. But the Secret Service is made up of men
+trained against that.
+
+“Come!” she said, and stepping down she took his arm.
+
+She led him past the thrones to other leather curtains in a wall, and
+through them into long hewn passages from cavern into cavern, until even
+the Rock of Gibraltar seemed like a doll's house in comparison.
+
+In one cave there were piles of javelins that had been stacked there by
+the Sleeper and his men. In another were sheaves of arrows; and in one
+were spears in racks against a wall. There were empty stables, with
+rings made fast into the rock where a hundred horses could have stood in
+line.
+
+She showed him a cave containing great forges, where the bronze had been
+worked, with charcoal still piled up against the wall at one end. There
+were copper and tin ingots in there of a shape he had never seen.
+
+“I know where they came from,” she told him. “I have made it my
+business to know all the 'Hills.' I know things the Hillmen's
+great-great-great-grand-fathers forgot! I know old workings that would
+make a modern nation rich! We shall have money when we need it, never
+fear! We shall conquer India while the English backs are turned and the
+best troops are oversea. We will bring a hundred thousand slaves back
+here to work our mines! With what they dig from the mines, copper and
+gold and tin, we will make ready to buy the English off when they are
+free to turn this way again. The English will do anything for money!
+They will be in debt when this war is over, and their price will be less
+then than now!”
+
+She laughed merrily at him because his face showed that he did not
+appreciate that stricture. Then she called him her Warrior and her
+Well-beloved and took him down a long passage, holding his hand all the
+way, to show him slots cut in the floor for the use of archers.
+
+“You entered Khinjan Caves by a tunnel under this floor, Well-beloved.
+There is no other entrance!”
+
+By this time Well-beloved was her name for him, although there was no
+air of finality about it. It was as if she paved the way for use of
+Athelstan and that was a sacred name. It was amazing how she conveyed
+that impression without using words.
+
+“The Sleeper cut these slots for his archers. Then he had another
+thought and set these cauldrons in place, to boil oil to pour down.
+Could any army force a way through by the route by which you entered?”
+
+“No,” he said, marveling at the ton-weight copper cauldrons, one to each
+hole.
+
+“Even without rifles for the defense?”
+
+“No,” he said.
+
+“And I have more than a thousand Mauser rifles here, and more than a
+million rounds of ammunition!”
+
+“How did you get them?”
+
+“I shall tell you that later. Come and see some other things. See and
+believe!”
+
+She showed him a cave in which boxes were stacked in high square piles.
+
+“Dynamite bombs!” she boasted. “How many boxes? I forget! Too many to
+count! Women brought them all the way from the sea, for even Muhammad
+Anim could not make Afridi riflemen carry loads. I have wondered what
+Bull-with-a-beard will say when he misses his precious dynamite!”
+
+“You've enough in there to blow the mountain up!” King advised her. “If
+somebody fired a pistol in here, the least would be the collapse of this
+floor into the tunnel below with a hundred thousand tons of rock on top
+of it. There is no other way out?”
+
+“Earth's Drink!” she said, and he made a grimace that set her to
+laughing.
+
+But she looked at him darkly after that and he got the impression that
+the thought was not new to her, and that she did not thank him for
+the advice. He began to wonder whether there was anything she had not
+thought of--any loophole she had left him for escape--any issue she had
+not foreseen.
+
+“Kill her!” a secret voice urged him. But that was the voice of the
+“Hills,” that are violent first and regretful afterward. He did not
+listen to it. And then the wisdom of the West came to him, as epitomized
+by Cocker along the lines laid down by Solomon.
+
+“It isn't possible to make a puzzle that has no solution to it. The fact
+that it's a puzzle is the proof that there's a key! Go ahead!”
+
+It was the “Go ahead!” that Solomon omitted, and that makes Cocker such
+cheerful reading. King ceased conjecturing and gave full attention to
+his guide.
+
+She showed him where eleven hundred Mauser rifles stood in racks in
+another cave, with boxes of ammunition piled beside them--each rifle and
+cartridge worth its weight in silver coin--a very rajah's ransom!
+
+“The Germans are generous in some things--only in some things--very
+mean in others!” she told him. “They sent no medical stores, and no
+blankets!”
+
+Past caves where provisions of every imaginable kind were stored,
+sufficient for an army, she led him to where her guards slept together
+with the thirty special men whom King had brought with him up the
+Khyber.
+
+“I have five hundred others whom I dare trust to come in here,” she
+said, “but they shall stay outside until I want them. A mystery is a
+good thing! It is good for them all to wonder what I keep in here! It is
+good to keep this sanctuary; it makes for power!”
+
+Pressing very close to him, she guided him down another dark tunnel
+until he and she stood together in the jaws of the round hole above the
+river, looking down into the cavern of Earth's Drink.
+
+Nobody looked up at them. The thousands were too busy working up a
+frenzy for the great jihad that was to come.
+
+Stacks of wood had been piled up, six-man high in the middle, and then
+fired. The heat came upward like a furnace blast, and the smoke was a
+great red cloud among the stalactites. Round and round that holocaust
+the thousands did their sword-dance, yelling as the devils yelled at
+Khinjan's birth. They needed no wine to craze them. They were drunk with
+fanaticism, frenzy, lust!
+
+“The women brought that wood from fifty miles away!” Yasmini shouted in
+his ear; for the din, mingling with the river's voice, made a volcano
+chord. “It is a week's supply of wood! But so they are--so they will be!
+They will lay waste India! They will butcher and plunder and burn! It
+will be what they leave of India that we shall build anew and govern,
+for India herself will rise to help them lay her own cities waste! It is
+always so! Conquests always are so! Come!”
+
+She tugged at him and led him back along the tunnel and through other
+tunnels to the throne room, where she made him sit at her feet again.
+
+The food had been cleared away in their absence. Instead, on the ebony
+table there were pens and ink and paper.
+
+She leaned back on her throne, with bare feet pressed tight against the
+footstool, staring, staring at the table and the pens, and then at
+King, as if she would compose an ultimatum to the world and send King to
+deliver it.
+
+“I said I will tell you,” she sad slowly. “Listen!”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIV
+
+
+
+     Nothing new! Nothing new!
+     Nowhere to hide when a reckoning's due,
+     But right earns right, and wrong gets rue,
+     With nothing deducted or given in lieu;
+     And neither the War God, I, nor you
+     Ever could make one lie come true!
+             Vale, Ceasar!
+
+
+As Yasmini herself had admitted, she headed from point to point after a
+manner of her own.
+
+“You know where is Dar es Salaam?” she asked.
+
+“East Africa,” said King.
+
+“How far is that from here?”
+
+“Two or three thousand miles.”
+
+“And English war-ships watch the Persian Gulf and all the seas from
+India to Aden?”
+
+King nodded.
+
+“Have the English any ships that dive under water?”
+
+He nodded again.
+
+“In these waters?”
+
+“I think not. I'm not sure, but I think not.”
+
+“The grenades you have seen, and the rifles and cartridges were sent by
+the Germans to Dar es Salaam, to suppress a rising of African natives.
+Does it begin to grow clear to you, my friend?”
+
+He smiled as well as nodded this time.
+
+“Muhammad Anim used to wait with a hundred women at a certain place on
+the seashore. What he found on the beach there he made the women carry
+on their heads to Khinjan. And by the time he had hidden what he found
+and returned from Khinjan to the beach, there were more things to
+find and bring. So they worked, he and the Germans, for I know not how
+long--with the English watching the seas as on land lean wolves comb the
+valleys.
+
+“Did you ever hear of the big whale in the Gulf?”
+
+“No,” said King. That was natural. There are as a rule about as many
+whales as salmon in the Persian Gulf.
+
+“A German who came to me in Delhi--he who first showed me pictures of
+an underwater ship--said that at that time the officers and crew of one
+such ship were getting great practise. Do you suppose their practise
+made whales take refuge in the Gulf?”
+
+“How should I know, Princess?”
+
+“Because I heard a story later, of an English cruiser on its way up
+the Gulf, that collided with a whale. The shock of hitting it bent many
+steel plates, and the cruiser had to put back for repair. It must have
+been a very big whale, for there was much oil on the sea for a long time
+afterward. So I heard.
+
+“And no more dynamite came--nor rifles--nor cartridges, although the
+Germans had promised more. And orders for Muhammad Anim that had been
+said to come by sea came now by way of Bagdad, carried by pilgrims
+returning from the holy places. I know that because I intercepted a
+letter and threw its bearer into Earth's Drink to save Muhammad Anim the
+trouble of asking questions.”
+
+“What were the terms of the German bargain?” King asked her. “What
+stipulations did they make?”
+
+“With the tribes? None! They were too wise. A jihad was decided on in
+Germany's good time; and when that time should come ten rifles in the
+'Hills' and a thousand cartridges would mean not only a hundred dead
+Englishmen, but ten times that number busily engaged. Why bargain when
+there was no need? A rifle is what it is. The 'Hills' are the 'Hills'!
+
+“Tell me about your lamp oil, then,” he said. “You burn enough oil in
+Khinjan Caves to light Bombay! That does not come by submarine. The
+sirkar knows how much of everything goes up the Khyber. I have seen
+the printed lists myself--a few hundred cans of kerosene--a few score
+gallons of vegetable oil, and all bound for farther north. There isn't
+enough oil pressed among the 'Hills' to keep these caves going for a
+day. Where does it all come from?”
+
+She laughed, as a mother laughs at a child's questions, finding
+delicious enjoyment in instructing him.
+
+“There are three villages, not two days' march from Khabul, where men
+have lived for centuries by pressing oil for Khinjan Caves,” she said.
+“The Sleeper fetched his oil thence. There are the bones of a camel in a
+cave I did not show you, and beside the camel are the leather bags still
+in which the oil was carried. Nowadays it comes in second-hand cans
+and drums. The Sleeper left gold in here. Those who kept the Sleeper's
+secret paid for the oil in gold. No Afghan troubled why oil was needed,
+so long as gold paid for it, until Abdurrahman heard the story. He made
+a ten-year-long effort to learn the secret, but he failed. When he cut
+off the supply of oil for a time, there was a rebellion so close to
+Khabul gates that he thought better of it. Of gold and Abdurrahman, gold
+was the stronger. And I know where the Sleeper dug his gold!”
+
+They sat in silence for a long while after that, she looking at the
+table, with its ink and pens and paper, and he thinking, with hands
+clasped round one knee; for it is wiser to think than to talk, even when
+a woman is near who can read thoughts that are not guarded.
+
+“Most disillusionments come simply,” King said at last. “D'you know,
+Princess, what has kept the sirkar from really believing in Khinjan
+Caves?”
+
+She shook her head. “The gods!” she said. “The gods can blindfold
+governments and whole peoples as easily as they can make us see!”
+
+“It was the fact that they knew what provisions and what oil and what
+necessities of life went up the Khyber and came down it. They knew a
+place such as this was said to be could not be. They knew it! They could
+prove it!”
+
+Yasmini nodded.
+
+“Let it be a lesson to you, Princess!”
+
+She stared, and her fiery-opal eyes began to change and glow. She began
+to twist her golden hair round the dagger hilt again. But always
+her feet were still on the footstool of the throne, as if she
+knew--knew--knew that she stood on firm foundations. No sirkar ever
+doubted less than she, and the suggestions in King's little homily did
+not please her. She looked toward the table again--then again into his
+eyes.
+
+“Athelstan!” she said. “It sounds like a king's name! What was the
+Sleeper's name? I have often wondered! I found no name in all the books
+about Rome that seemed to fit him. None of the names I mouthed could
+make me dream as the sight of him could. But, Athelstan! That is a
+name like a king's! It seems to fit him, too! Was there such a name, in
+Rome?”
+
+“No,” he said.
+
+“What does it mean?” she asked him.
+
+“Slow of resolution!”
+
+She clapped her hands.
+
+“Another sign!” she laughed. “The gods love me! There always is a
+sign when I need one! Slow of resolution, art thou? I will speed thy
+resolution, Well-beloved! You were quick to change from King, of the
+Khyber Rifle Regiment, to Kurram Khan. Change now into my warrior--my
+dear lord--my King again!”
+
+She rose, with arms outstretched to him. All her dancer's art, her
+untamed poetry, her witchery, were expressed in a movement. Her eyes
+melted as they met his. And since he stood up, too, for manner's sake,
+they were eye to eye again--almost lip to lip. Her sweet breath was in
+his nostrils.
+
+In another moment she was in his arms, clinging to him, kissing him. And
+if any man has felt on his lips the kiss of all the scented glamour of
+the East, let him tell what King's sensations were. Let Ceasar, who was
+kissed by Cleopatra, come to life and talk of it!
+
+King's arm is strong, and he did not stand like an idol. His head might
+swim, but she, too, tasted the delirium of human passion loosed and
+given for a mad swift minute. If his heart swelled to bursting, so must
+hers have done.
+
+“I have needed you!” she whispered. “I have been all alone! I have
+needed you!”
+
+Then her lips sought his again, and neither spoke.
+
+Neither knew how long it was before she began to understand that he, not
+she, was winning. The human answer to her appeal was full. He gave her
+all she asked of admiration, kiss for kiss. And then--her arms did not
+cling so tightly, although his strong right arm was like a stanchion.
+Because he knew that he, not she, was winning, he picked her up in his
+arms and kissed her as if she were a child. And then, because he knew he
+had won, he set her on her feet on the footstool of the throne, and even
+pitied her.
+
+She felt the pity. As she tossed the hair back over her shoulder her
+eyes glowed with another meaning--dangerous--like a tiger's glare.
+
+“You pity me? You think because I love you, you can feed my love on a
+plate to the Indian government? You think my love is a weapon to use
+against me? Your love for me may wait for a better time? You are not so
+wise as I thought you, Athelstan!”
+
+But he knew he had won. His heart was singing down inside him as it had
+not sung since he left India behind. But he stood quite humbly before
+her, for had he not kissed her?
+
+“You think a kiss is the bond between us? You mistake! You forget! The
+kiss, my Athelstan, was the fruit, not the seed! The seed came first! If
+I loosed you--if I set you free--you would never dare go back to India!”
+
+He scarcely heard her. He knew he had won. His heart was like a bird,
+fluttering wildly. He knew that the next step would be shown him, and
+for the present he had time and grace to pity her, knowing how he would
+have felt if she had won. Besides, he had kissed her, and he had not
+lied. Each kiss had been a tribute of admiration, for was she not
+splendid--amazing--more to be desired than wine? He stood with bowed
+head, lest the triumph in his eyes offend her. Yet if any one had asked
+him how he knew that he had won, he never could have told.
+
+“If you were to go back to India except as its conqueror, they would
+strip the buttons from your uniform and tear your medals off and shoot
+you in the back against a wall! My signature is known in India and I am
+known. What I write will be believed. Rewa Gunga shall take a letter.
+He shall take two--four--witnesses. He shall see them on their way and
+shall give them the letter when they reach the Khyber and shall send
+them into India with it. Have no fear. Bull-with-a-beard shall not
+intercept them, as I have intercepted his men. When Rewa Gunga shall
+return and tell me he saw my letter on its way down the Khyber, then we
+shall talk again about pity--you and I! Come!”
+
+She took his arm, as if her threats had been caresses. Triumph shone
+from her eyes. She tossed her brave chin and laughed at him, only
+encouraged to greater daring by his attitude.
+
+“Why don't you kill me?” she asked, and though his answer surprised her,
+it did not make her angry.
+
+“It would do no good,” he said simply.
+
+“Would you kill me if you thought it would do good?”
+
+“Certainly!” he said.
+
+She laughed at that as if it were the greatest joke she had ever heard.
+It set her in the best humor possible, and by the time they reached the
+ebony table and she had taken the pen and dipped it in the ink, she was
+chuckling to herself as if the one good joke had grown into a hundred.
+
+She wrote in Urdu. It is likely that for all her knowledge of the spoken
+English tongue she was not so swift or ready with the trick of writing
+it. She had said herself that a babu read English books to her aloud.
+But she wrote in Urdu with an easy flowing hand, and in two minutes she
+had thrown sand on the letter and had given it to King to read. It was
+not like a woman's letter. It did not waste a word.
+
+        “Your Captain King has been too much trouble.  He has
+        taken money from the Germans.  He adopted native dress.
+        He called himself Kurram Khan.  He slew his own brother
+        at night in the Khyber Pass.  These men will say that
+        he carried the head to Khinjan, and their word is true,
+        for I, Yasmini, saw.  He used the head for a passport,
+        to obtain admittance.  He proclaims a jihad!  He urges
+        invasion of India!  He held up his brother's head
+        before five thousand men and boasted of the murder.
+        The next you shall hear of your Captain King of the
+        Khyber Rifles, he will be leading a jihad into India.
+        You would have better trusted me.  Yasmini.”
+
+He read it and passed it back to her.
+
+“They will not disbelieve me,” she said, triumphant as the very devil
+over a branded soul all hot. “They will be sure you are mad, and they
+will believe the witnesses!”
+
+He bowed. She sealed the letter and addressed it with only a scrawled
+mark on its outer cover. That, by the way, was utter insolence, for the
+mark would be understood at any frontier post by the officer commanding.
+
+“Rewa Gunga shall start with this to-day!” she said, with more amusement
+than malice. After that she was still for a moment, watching his eyes,
+at a loss to understand his carelessness. He seemed strangely unabased.
+His folded arms were not defiant, but neither were they yielding.
+
+“I love you, Athelstan!” she said. “Do you love me?”
+
+“I think you are very beautiful, Princess!”
+
+“Beautiful? I know I am beautiful. But is that all?”
+
+“Clever!” he added.
+
+She began to drum with the golden dagger hilt on the table, and to
+look dangerous, which is not to infer by any means that she looked less
+lovely.
+
+“Do you love me?” she asked.
+
+“Forgive me, Princess, but you forget. I was born east of Mecca, but my
+folk were from the West. We are slower to love than some other nations.
+With us love is more often growth, less often surrender at first sight.
+I think you are wonderful.”
+
+She nodded and tucked the sealed letter in her bosom.
+
+“It shall go,” she said darkly, “and another letter with it. They looted
+your brother's body. In his pocket they found the note you wrote him,
+and that you asked him to destroy! That will be evidence. That will
+convince! Come!”
+
+He followed her through leather curtains again and down the dark
+passage into the outer chamber; and the illusion was of walking behind a
+golden-haired Madonna to some shrine of Innocence. Her perfume was like
+incense; her manner perfect reverence. She passed into the cave where
+the two dead bodies lay like a high priestess performing a rite.
+
+Walking to the bed, she stood for minutes, gazing at the Sleeper and
+his queen. And from the new angle from which King saw him the Sleeper's
+likeness to himself was actually startling. Startling--weird--like an
+incantation were Yasmini's words when at last she spoke.
+
+“Muhammad lied! He lied in his teeth! His sons have multiplied his lie!
+Siddhattha, whom men have called Gotama, the Buddha, was before Muhammad
+and he knew more! He told of the wheel of things, and there is a wheel!
+Yet, what knew the Buddha of the wheel? He who spoke of Dharma (the
+customs of the law) not knowing Dharma! This is true---Of old there was
+a wish of the gods--of the old gods. And so these two were. There is a
+wish again now of the old gods. So, are we two not as they two were? It
+is the same wish, and lo! We are ready, this man and I. We will obey, ye
+gods--ye old gods!”
+
+She raised her arms and, going closer to the bed, stood there in an
+attitude of mystic reverence, giving and receiving blessings.
+
+“Dear gods!” she prayed. “Dear old gods--older than these 'Hills'--show
+me in a vision what their fault was--why these two were ended before the
+end!
+
+“I know all the other things ye have shown me. I know the world's silly
+creeds have made it mad, and it must rend itself, and this man and I
+shall reap where the nations sowed--if only we obey! Wherein, ye old
+dear gods, who love me, did these two disobey? I pray you, tell me in a
+vision!”
+
+She shook her head and sighed. Sadness seemed to have crept over her,
+like a cold mist from the night. It was as if she could dimly see her
+plans foredoomed, and yet hoped on in spite of it. The fatalism that she
+scorned as Muhammad's lie held her in its grip, and her natural courage
+fought with it. Womanlike, she turned to King in that minute and
+confided to him her very inmost thoughts. And he, without an inkling as
+to how she must fail, yet knew that she must, and pitied her.
+
+“Have you seen that breast under the armor?” she asked suddenly. “Come
+nearer! Come and look! Why did his breast decay and his body stay whole
+like hers? Did she kill him? Was that a dagger-stab in his breast? I
+found perfume in these caves--great jars of it, and I use it always.
+It is better than temple incense and all the breath of gardens in
+the spring! I have put it on slaughtered animals. Where the knife has
+touched them, they decay--as that man's breast did--but the rest of
+them remains undecaying year after year. It was a knife, I think, that
+pierced his breast. I think that scent is the preservative. Did she kill
+him? Was she jealous of him? How did she die? There is no mark on her!
+Athelstan--listen! I think he would have failed her! I think she stabbed
+him rather than see him fail, and then swallowed poison! Afterward their
+servants laid them there. She smiles in death because she knew the wheel
+will turn and that death dies too! He looks grim because he knew less
+than she. It is always woman who understands and man who fails! I think
+she stabbed him. She should have loved him better, and then there would
+have been no need. I will love you better than she loved him!”
+
+She turned and devoured him with her eyes, so that it needed all his
+manhood to hold him back from being her slave that minute. For in that
+minute she left no charm unexercised--sex--mesmerisrn--beauty--flattery
+(her eyes could flatter as a dumb dog's flatter a huntsman!)--grace
+unutterable-mystery--she used every art on him she knew. Yet he stood
+the test.
+
+“Even if you fail me, Well-beloved, I will love you! The gods who gave
+you to me will know how to make you love; and lessons are to learn. If
+you fail me I will forgive, knowing that in the end the gods will never
+let you fail me! You are mine, and Earth is ours, for the old gods
+intend it so!”
+
+She seemed to expect him to take her in his arms again; but he stood
+respectfully and made no answer, nor any move. Grim and strong his jowl
+was, like the Sleeper's, and the dark hair three days old on it softened
+nothing of its lines. His Roman nose and steady, dark, full eyes
+suggested no compromise. Yet he was good to look at. She had not lied
+when she said she loved him, and he understood her and was sorry. But he
+did not look sorry, nor did he offer any argument to quench her love. He
+was a servant of the raj; his life and his love had been India's
+since the day he first buckled on his spurs, and Yasmini wouldn't have
+understood that.
+
+Nor did she understand that, even supposing he had loved her with
+all his heart, not on any conditions would he have admitted it until
+absolutely free, any more than that if she crucified him he would love
+her the same, supposing that he loved her at all. Nor did she trust the
+“old gods” too well, or let them work unaided.
+
+“Come with me, Athelstan!” she said. She took his arm--found little
+jeweled slippers in a closet hewn in the wall--put them on and led him
+to the curtains he had entered by. She led him through them, and, red as
+cardinals in lamplight on the other side, they stood hand-in-hand, back
+to the leather, facing the unfathomable dark. Her fingers were so strong
+that he could not have wrenched his own away without using the other
+hand to help.
+
+“Where are your shoes?” she asked him.
+
+“At the foot of these steps, Princess.”
+
+“Can you see them yonder in the dark?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Can you guess where the darkness leads to?”
+
+“No.”
+
+He shuddered and she chuckled.
+
+“Could you return alone by the way Ismail brought you?”
+
+“I think not.”
+
+“Will you try?”
+
+“If I must. I am not afraid.”
+
+“You have heard the echo? Yes, I know you heard the echo. Hear it
+again!”
+
+She raised her head and howled like a wolf--like a lone wolf that has
+found no quarry--melancholy, mean, grown reckless with his hunger. There
+was a pause of nearly a minute. Then in the hideous darkness a phantom
+wolf-pack took up the howl in chorus, and for three long minutes there
+was din beside which the voice of living wolves at war would be a
+slumber song. Ten times ghastlier than if it had been real, the chorus
+wailed and ululated back and forth along immeasurable distances--became
+one yell again--and went howling down into earth's bowels as if the last
+of a phantom pack were left behind and yelling to be waited for.
+
+When it ceased at last King was sweating.
+
+“Nor am I afraid,” she laughed, squeezing his hand yet tighter.
+
+She led him down the steps, and at the foot told him to put on his
+slippers, as if he were a child. Then, hurrying as if those opal eyes
+of hers were indifferent to dark or daylight, she picked her way among
+boulders that he could feel but not see, along a floor that was only
+smooth in places, for a distance that was long enough by two or three
+times to lose him altogether.
+
+When he looked back there was no sign of red lights behind him. And when
+he looked forward, there was a dim outer light in front and a whiff of
+the cool fresh air that presages the dawn!
+
+She led him through a gap on to a ledge of rock that hung thousands of
+feet above the home of thunder, a ledge less than six feet wide, less
+than twenty long, tilted back toward the cliff. There they sat, watching
+the stars. And there they saw the dawn come.
+
+Morning looks down into Khinjan hours after the sun has risen, because
+the precipices shut it out. But the peaks on every side are very beacons
+of the range at the earliest peep of dawn. In silence they watched day's
+herald touch the peaks with rosy jeweled fingers--she waiting as if she
+expected the marvel of it all to make King speak.
+
+It was cold. She came and snuggled close to him, and it was so they
+watched the sparkle of dawn's jewels die and the peaks grow gray again,
+she with an arm on his shoulder and strands of her golden hair blown
+past his face.
+
+“Of what are you thinking?” she asked him at last.
+
+“Of India, Princess.”
+
+“What of India?”
+
+“She lies helpless.”
+
+“Ah! You love India?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“You shall love me better! You shall love me better than your life!
+Then, for love of me, you shall own the India you think you love! This
+letter shall go!” She tapped her bosom. “It is best to cut you off from
+India first. You shall lose that you may win!”
+
+She got up and stood in the gap, smiling mockingly, framed in the
+darkness of the cave behind.
+
+“I understand!” she said. “You think you are my enemy. Love and hate
+never lived side by side. You shall see!”
+
+Then in an instant she was gone, backward into the dark. He sat and
+waited for her, cross-legged on the ledge. As daylight began to filter
+downward he could dimly make out the waterfall, thundering like the
+whelming of a world; he sat staring at it, trying to formulate a plan,
+until it dawned on him that he was nearly chilled to the bone. Then he
+got up and stepped through the gap, too.
+
+“Princess!” he called. Then louder, “Princess!”
+
+When the echo of his own voice died, it was as if the ghoul who made the
+echoes had taken shape. A beard--red eye-rims--and a hook nose came out
+of the dark, and Ismail bared yellow teeth.
+
+“Come!” he said. “Come, little hakim!”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XV
+
+
+
+     Private preserves?  New Notions?
+     Measure me a quart of honesty,
+     And I will trade it for a pound weight of my thoughts.
+     Then you and I shall go and dream together
+     A brand-new dream of things that never happened,
+     Nor ever can be.  Come, trade with me!
+
+
+What Yasmini had been doing in the minutes while King stared from the
+ledge in the dawn was unguessable. Perhaps she had been praying to
+her old gods. At least she had given Ismail strict orders, for he said
+nothing, but seized King's hand and led him through the dark as a rat
+leads a blind one--swiftly, surely, unhesitating. King had no means
+whatever of guessing their direction. They did not pass the two lights
+again with the curtain and the steps all glowing red.
+
+They came instead to other steps, narrow and steep, that led upward in a
+semicircle to a rough hole in a rock wall. At the top there was a little
+yellow light, so dim and small that its rays scarcely sufficed to show
+the opening.
+
+“Go up!” said Ismail, giving King a shove and disappearing at once. One
+side-step into blackness and he might have been a mile away.
+
+So King went up, stooping to feel each next footing with a cautious
+hand. He was beginning to be sleepy, and to suspect that Yasmini had
+taken him to view the dawn with just that end in view. Nothing can make
+tired eyes so long for sleep as a glimpse of waking day--Sleepy eyes are
+easiest to trick.
+
+It was not many minutes before he was sure his guess was right.
+
+The opening at the head of the stairs led into a tunnel. He followed
+it with a hand on either wall and reached another of Khinjan's strange
+leather curtains. His face struck the leather unexpectedly, and at that
+instant, as if his touch were electric, the curtain sprang aside and his
+eyes were dazzled by the light of diamonds.
+
+It was Aladdin's Cave, with her acting spirit of the lamp! It needed
+effort of self-control to know that the huge, white, cut crystals that
+sparkled all about the hewn cell could not be diamonds. They were as big
+as his head, and bigger--at least a hundred of them, and they multiplied
+the light of half a dozen little oil lamps until the cave seemed the
+home of light.
+
+Yasmini had not a jewel on her. She was in a new mood and new garments
+to suit it. Her feet were still bare, but she was robed from head to
+heel in pure white linen, on which her long hair shone as if it were
+truly strands of gold. She received him with an air of mystic calm,
+gracious and dignified as the high-priestess of a Grecian temple. She
+seemed devout--to have forgotten that she ever killed a man, or made a
+threat or plotted for a kingdom.
+
+“Be still,” she said, raising a finger. “The old gods talk to us in
+here. It is not for us to answer them in words, but in deeds. Let us
+listen and do!”
+
+There were two cushions--great billowy modern ones, covered in gold
+brocade--on the floor in the midst of the cave. Between them was a stand
+of ivory, some two feet high, whose top was a disk, cut from the largest
+tusk that ever could have been. On the disk resting in a little hollow
+in the ivory, was a pure, perfect crystal sphere of a foot diameter.
+He could see his reflection in it, and Yasmini's, too, the moment he
+entered the cave, and whichever way they moved both images remained
+undistorted. He suspected that the lighting and the crystal reflectors
+had not been arranged at random.
+
+In each corner of the four-square cave there was a brazier of bronze,
+and from each rose incense smoke, straight upward. The four streams of
+smoke met at the ceiling and converged into a cloud that hung almost
+motionless.
+
+Yasmini stepped very reverently to a cushion by the crystal in the
+middle, and signed to King to imitate her. They stood facing. She seemed
+to pray, for her eyes were hidden under the long lashes. Then she knelt,
+and King did the same, his knees sinking deep into another cushion. So
+they knelt eye to eye above the crystal for many minutes without either
+saying a word. It was Yasmini who spoke first.
+
+“The old gods have showed me the past many and many a time in this,” she
+said. “It is, their way of speaking to me. Now, to-day, I have prayed to
+them to show me the future. Look! Look, Athelstan! Do as I do--so!”
+
+There seemed nothing to be gained by disobeying her. To obey her might
+be to win new insight into the ramifications of her plans. Men who have
+experience of the East are the last to deny that there is method in
+Eastern magic; they glimpse the knowledge that belonged to Pharaoh's
+men, although unlike Moses they are not always able to confound it. The
+East forgets nothing. The West ignores. But there are men from the West
+who are willing to look and to listen and to try to understand; like
+King, they go high in the Service. There are others who look on at the
+magic with an understanding eye and are caught by it. Their end is not
+good to contemplate. The East is fettered in her own mesmeric spell and
+must suffer until she wakes.
+
+Yasmini held the upright column of the ivory stand with both hands,
+close under the disk at the top. He copied her, placing his hands below
+hers. Hers slipped down and covered his, soft and warm; and so they
+stayed.
+
+“Look!” she said. “Look!”
+
+Her own eyes were grown big and round, and she gazed at the crystal ball
+as she had looked into King's eyes that night, with the very hunger of
+her soul. Her lips were parted. Watching her, King grew expectant, too.
+His eyes followed hers, to stare into the middle of the crystal, no
+longer feeling sleepy, and in less than a minute he could not have
+withdrawn them had he tried.
+
+The crystal clouded over. Yasmini's breath came steadily, with a little
+hissing sound between her teeth, and the crystal, or else the whole
+world, seemed to sway in time to it. Then the man in Roman armor strode
+out of a mist, and all was steady again and easy to understand. When the
+man in armor opened his lips to speak, one knew what he had said. When
+he frowned, one knew why he frowned. When he smiled, one knew that she
+was coming.
+
+And she did come, dancing out of the mist behind him, to fling soft arms
+round his neck and whisper praises in his ear. He stood like a king who
+has come into his own, with an arm round her and his chin held high. She
+kissed him on his proud chin, and laughed into his face.
+
+There were troubles--difficulties, all in the mist behind, but he stood
+and despised them then while she caressed him!
+
+Just as spoken words had no part in the vision, yet the whole was
+understood, so time did not enter into it. There was no connecting link
+between each scene; each dissolved into the other, and all were one.
+
+She faded into mist, in a swirl of graceful drapery, and he frowned
+again. A long line of men-at-arms stood before him, grim as he and as
+discontented. They leaned on spears, at ease, and that seemed to annoy
+him most of all. A spokesman stood out from the ranks and addressed him,
+with gesticulations and a head so far thrown back that his helmet-plume
+stood out like a secretary's pen behind him. He was not a Roman,
+although there was something Roman about his attitude and armor. None of
+the men-at-arms was a Roman.
+
+They demanded to be led home, wherever home was. (It was as plain as if
+their spokesman had shouted it into King's ear aloud.) And he refused
+them bluntly, proudly.
+
+Two men brought him a native woman, each holding an arm and thrusting
+her forward between them. She was not at all unlike a native woman of
+to-day, either in dress or sullenness; she had the beak and the keen
+eyes and the cruel lips of the “Hills.” They showed her to him, and it
+was quite clear that they compared her to their own women, left behind;
+the comparison was plainly to her disadvantage.
+
+He wasted no argument on them, but his scorn made the two men fade away,
+and the woman with them. Yet he had no scorn for his lined-up fighting
+men, and so could act none. He ordered the spokesman back to the ranks,
+and the man obeyed. He gave another order, and the long lines stood at
+attention, spears straight up and down, and their round sheilds like
+great medallions on a wall. He ordered them away, but they stood still.
+
+Then he did a truly Roman thing. He got his harness off--unbuckled and
+took off the great bronze corselet, in which he lay dead in another
+cave. He threw it down--tore open the white shirt underneath--and held
+his arms out. He bade them come and kill him. He bade them drive their
+spears into his unprotected breast.
+
+There was not a movement down the line of men. They stood
+as a cliff looks at the tide. He dared them. He called them
+cowards--women--weaklings afraid of blood. But they stood still. He
+strode up and down the line, seeking a man with heart enough to plunge a
+spear into him, and no man moved.
+
+Then he stood still before them all again and wept, because they loved
+him and he loved them. And then she came, not dancing this time, but
+barefooted and walking like a poem of the early days of Greece. She
+picked up his corselet and buckled it on him, making him hold up
+his arms and kneel while she slipped it over his head. And the grim
+men-at-arms hove their long spears up into the air and roared her an
+ovation, bringing down their right feet with a thunder all together.
+
+“Ave!”
+
+But the mist closed up and then the crystal was clear again. It was
+Yasmini's voice that spoke, King looked up into her eyes, and they
+made him shudder, for he had never seen eyes like them. Her hands still
+clasped his own, burning hot. She was more terrible than Khinjan.
+
+“I never saw that before,” she said. “It is because you are here! We
+shall see it all now! We shall know it all! We shall know whether it
+was she who killed him, or whether his own men took him at his word. We
+shall know! Look again! Look again!”
+
+His eyes seemed unable to obey his own will any longer. They obeyed
+her voice. He gazed again into the crystal, and it clouded over. But
+although he obeyed her, the crystal obeyed him and answered at least in
+part the questions his imagination asked. He was not conscious of asking
+anything, but being a soldier his curiosity followed a more or less
+definite line.
+
+Yasmini's breath began to come and go again with the little hissing
+sound. Her hot hands pressed his own. The mist suddenly dissolved. There
+was a road--a long white road, across a plain, and the men-at-arms
+fought their way along it. They were facing east.
+
+Archers opposed them--archers on foot, and cavalry--Parthians. The
+Parthians were wild, but the drill of the men-at-arms was a thing to
+marvel at. When the flights of arrows came they knelt behind their
+shields. When the horsemen charged they closed in solid phalanx, and
+the inner ranks hurled javelins at ten-yard range. When the fury of the
+onslaught died they formed in column and went forward, gaining furlongs
+at a time while their enemy watched them and wondered.
+
+It was plain that the enemy expected them to retreat sooner or later,
+for the archers and cavalry were at great pains to get behind them, so
+that before long the road ahead was less well defended than that behind.
+It did not seem to occur to the enemy that they were pressing toward the
+distant line of hills and did not seek to return at all.
+
+They had no baggage to impede them. It was absurd to suppose they would
+not try to fight a way back soon. They must be a Roman raiding party,
+out to teach Parthians a lesson. Yet they pressed ever forward, and the
+hills grew ever nearer; while he sat a great brown charger calmly in
+their midst and gave them not too many orders, but here and there a word
+of praise, and once or twice a trumpet shout of encouragement. He seemed
+to own the knack of being wherever the fight was fiercest. His mere
+presence seemed better than a hundred men when the phalanx bent before
+charging cavalry.
+
+She rode a little white horse, beside him always and utterly scornful
+of the risk. She wore no armor--carried no shield. Her bare feet showed
+through the sandal straps, and the outlines of her lissom body were
+quite visible through the muslin stuff she wore. She might have just
+come from the dancing. She had a flower in her hand, and a wreath of
+flowers in her hair. She shouted more encouragement than he. She shouted
+too much. Once he laid a strong brown hand across her mouth, and she
+held it there and kissed it.
+
+They lost men--five or six or ten or twenty at each onslaught. Perhaps
+they had been a thousand strong in the beginning. Their own men--the
+regimental surgeons probably--cut the throats of the badly wounded, to
+save them from the enemy's attentions; and by this time they were not
+more than seven or eight hundred strong.
+
+But they went forward--ever forward--and the line of hills drew near.
+Then he began to stir himself, and she with him. He shouted to them to
+charge, and she echoed him, leaving his side at last to take command
+of a wing and sting the tired-out men-at-arms into new enthusiasm. In
+a minute they were a roaring tide that swept forward to the foot of the
+hills and surged upward without a check. In a little while they were
+hurling boulders down on an enemy that seemed inclined to parley.
+
+Then, like a shadow of the incense cloud above, the mist closed up in
+the crystal again, and in a moment more King and Yasmini were looking
+into each other's eyes again above it.
+
+“I have seen that before,” she said, shaking her, head. “I am weary of
+their battles. They won; that is enough! I must know how they failed, so
+that we make no such mistakes!”
+
+Her face was flushed, and her eyes glowed with the fire that is not lit
+by ordinary passion. She was being eaten by ambition--burned by her own
+fire--by ambition not totally selfish, for she yearned to shepherd King
+as she seemed to think this woman of the vision had not shepherded the
+man in armor.
+
+“Look again!” she said. “Look again! And oh, ye old gods, show--show me
+wherein she failed!”
+
+They stared again, and once more the crystal clouded. Out of the cloud
+came a city in the middle of a plain, and the city was besieged. It was
+not a very great city, but from the outside it looked rich, for domes
+and roofs and towers showed above the wall, all well built and well
+preserved. He and she, sitting their horses out of arrow range from the
+main gate seemed confident of taking it and eager to get it over with.
+
+They no longer had only six or seven hundred men, but men by the
+thousand. Their veterans in Roman armor were in command of others now,
+and they had a human pack-train with them, heavily burdened captives who
+sulked in chains under a guard.
+
+The mist cleared further, and the gate gave in under the blows of an
+improvised battering-ram, covered by showers of arrows from short
+range. Then, like a river breaking down a dam, the thousands stormed in,
+howling. Smoke rose. There were screams of women. A great tower near the
+gate, that was half wood, half stone, crackled and curled up in yellow
+and crimson flame. He and she rode in together as modern men and women
+ride through a gate to the covert side at a fox-hunt. They chatted and
+laughed together, and their horses pranced, responding to the humor of
+their riders.
+
+King would have liked to tear his eyes away from the scenes that
+followed in the tree-lined streets, but the crystal ball held him as
+if in a trance--that and Yasmini's hands that clasped his own like hot
+torture chamber clamps. Animals fighting to the death are not so vile,
+nor so inhuman as men can be in the hour of what they call victory. Even
+the little children of that city paid the penalty for having closed the
+gate.
+
+Time was no measure to the crystal ball. In minutes it showed the
+devil's work of hours. The city went up in smoke and flame, and from
+the far side through a great breach in the wall the conquerors went
+out, with their plunder and such prisoners as had been saved to drag and
+carry it.
+
+Now there were wagons and camels and horses. Now there were tents and
+furniture. Now each man of the fighting force had as much as he himself
+could carry, as well as what was loaded on the prisoners.
+
+Only he and she seemed to care nothing for the loot and rode as if each
+was all the other needed. Still he wore nothing but his armor, and
+she no more than her dancing dress and sandals. But now she had eight
+prisoners to hold a panoply above her horse and keep the sun from her.
+
+She had flowers woven in her hair, and others in her hand, as if she
+rode from a bridal feast and were not in mourning for a plundered,
+butchered city. They were headed northward now, toward distant
+mountains, and the dust of their long column went up like a river of
+smoke, flowing from the holocaust behind.
+
+Yasmini shook her head impatiently. The crystal clouded over, and King's
+eyes were free.
+
+“I am tired of it,” she said. “I have seen that so many times. I know
+they won. I know they found their way to Khinjan. I know they began to
+build an empire here. I have seen all that a hundred times. What I must
+know is what mistake they made. What did they do wrong? How did they
+come to fail? Look again! Let us look again!”
+
+She never once let King's hands go, but pressed them tighter and
+tighter until the circulation nearly stopped and they grew numb. Her own
+strength seemed endless--to grow rather than to wane in proportion as
+her yearning to look into the past grew. Her attitude would have
+been more understandable if she had believed herself and King to be
+reincarnations of those forgotten conquerors; but she was too original
+for that. She had said the old gods wished, and the man and the woman
+were; the old gods wished the same wish again, and she and King were.
+Why then, if the old gods were contriving it all, should she seek to
+steady the ark for them? But down at bottom there is no logic connected
+with gods many. She clutched King's fingers as if to hold him there, and
+to make him see and understand the distant past, were the only way to
+save him from mistakes.
+
+“Look!” she insisted. “Look again!” And he obeyed her. By this time
+obedience was much the easiest course. Between times his eyes were so
+weary he could hardly hold them open, and it was only when he gazed into
+the crystal that he could rest them and feel easy. He knew well that
+she was winning control over him in some sort, and he fought against it
+grimly. Soon he became weirdly conscious of being two men--one, whom she
+had grasped and overcome, a physical man who did not matter much, and
+another, mental man who was free from her, who could understand her,
+whom she could not reach or touch.
+
+“Look!” she insisted. “Look!” And the crystal clouded over.
+
+He strode out of the mist again, frowning, with his chin hung low and
+fists clenched tight at his sides. Four of his own men came out of the
+mist to him and greeted him respectfully, yet not without a touch of
+irony.
+
+They spoke to him and pointed westward. One laid a hand on his shoulder,
+but he shook it off and the man reeled back as if he had been struck.
+Another man took up the argument, but he shook his head. They all spoke
+together, gesticulating and growing angry; but he stood calm among them,
+as a rock stands in a storm. He folded his arms across his breast after
+a while and listened, saying nothing.
+
+Then as if to end the argument for good and all, he drew his sword and
+held it out toward them, hilt first, telling them again to kill him
+and have done with it. They refused. He laughed at them, but they still
+refused; so he put his sword back in the sheath.
+
+One of the men stepped into the mist and disappeared. Presently he
+came again, with two others, helping a wounded man along between them.
+Whoever the wounded man might be he was treated with respect. Prouder
+than Lucifer, he who had struck another man's hand from off his shoulder
+knelt to give this wounded man a knee and seemed pained when the man
+refused him.
+
+The wounded man pointed to the westward too and argued in short
+clipped-off sentences. He had a day or two to live--certainly not
+longer, for the blood flowed slowly from a wound that would not stanch;
+yet he argued as a man who has lost no interest in life, but rather sees
+its problems truly now that his own are near an end.
+
+He demanded something almost truculently. He took his helmet off and
+passed it down to him. With fingers that were growing feeble the wounded
+man held it and traced out the letters S. P. Q. R. on the front.
+
+“Go home!” he said, passing it back to him. “Fight your way back home!”
+ What he said was as distinct as if a voice in the cave had spoken it.
+
+Then, vision within a vision--dream within a dream--there was a view of
+the Via Appia, with gaunt grim gallows set along it in a row and on them
+a regiment's commander crucified along with the remnant of his men.
+
+“So Rome treats traitors!” said a voice, that might have been either
+man's.
+
+But instantly there was another vision, of ten thousand wolves baying
+down a Himalayan gorge in winter-time, the sleet frozen stiff on their
+fur and their tongues hanging. Eye and fang flashed altogether and made
+one gleam.
+
+“Choose!” said a voice.
+
+So he chose. He nodded. The men saluted him, and the wounded man was
+helped away to die. And then she came, angry as a flash of lightning, to
+spring at him and cling to him and call him names--begging, demanding,
+ordering, crying--abusing him and praising him in turn. He shook his
+head. She sobbed, but he shook his head again and pointed westward.
+Then she took him by the hand and led him away, not looking at his face
+again.
+
+The crystal ball grew clouded. Yasmini's breath came and went as if she
+were running in a race, and her pressure on King's fingers was actually
+painful. The mist dissolved, and King forgot the pressure--forgot
+everything. The man in armor lay dead on his back in the cave on the
+wooden bed, and she bent over him, dagger in hand.
+
+“Ah!” said Yasmini, her teeth chattering. “But what else could she do?”
+ The mist closed in again and the crystal grew opaque. “The future!” she
+begged. “It is the future I must know! Ye old gods, tell me! Show me!”
+
+The mist turned red. The crystal ball became as it were a ball of fire
+revolving within itself. The fire turned to blood, and the blood to
+fire again. The very cavern that they knelt in seemed to sway. Yasmini
+screamed and moaned. She loosed King's hands to cover her own eyes.
+
+And as she did that King sank, like a sack half-empty and toppled over
+sidewise on the floor asleep.
+
+He neither dreamed nor was conscious of anything, but slept like a dead
+man, having fought against her mesmerism harder than he knew.
+
+Statesmen, generals, outlaws, all make their big mistakes and manage to
+recover. Very nearly always it is an apparently little mistake that does
+most damage in the end, something unnoticeable at the time, that grows
+in geometrical proportion, minus instead of plus.
+
+Yasmini made her little mistake that minute in believing King was
+utterly mesmerized at last and utterly in her power. Whereas in truth he
+was only weary. It may be that she gave him orders in his sleep, after
+the accepted manner of mesmerists; but if she did, they never reached
+him; he was far too fast asleep. He slept so deep and long that he was
+not conscious of men's voices, nor of being carried, nor of time, nor of
+anxiety, nor of anything.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI
+
+
+
+     Wolf met wolf in the dawning day
+     Where scent hung sweet over trodden clay,
+     And square each stood in the jungle way
+     Eyeing the other with ears laid back.
+     Still were the watchers.  When foe greets foe
+     The wisest are quietest.  Better to go--
+     Who stays to watch trouble woos trouble!
+             But lo!
+     They trotted together to hunt one doe,
+     Eyeing each other with ears laid back.
+
+
+When King awoke he lay on a comfortable bed in a cave he had never yet
+seen, but there was no trace of Yasmini, nor of the men who must have
+carried him to it. Barbaric splendor and splendor that was not by any
+means barbaric lay all about--tiger skins, ivory-legged chairs, graven
+bronze vases, and a yak-hair shawl worth a rajah's ransom.
+
+The cave was spacious and not gloomy, for there was a wide door,
+apparently unguarded, and another square opening cut in the rock to
+serve as a window. Through both openings light streamed in like taut
+threads of Yasmini's golden hair--strings of a golden zither, on which
+his own heart's promptings played a tune.
+
+He had no idea how long he had slept, but judged from memory of his
+former need of sleep and recogntion of his present freshness--and from
+the fact that it was a morning sun that shone through the openings--that
+he must have slept the clock round.
+
+It did not matter. He knew it did not matter in the least. He had
+no more plan than a mathematician has who starts to solve a problem,
+knowing that twice two is four in infinite combination. Like the
+mathematician, he knew that he must win.
+
+No man ever won a battle or conceived a stroke of statesmanship, no
+great deed was ever accomplished without a first taste of the triumphant
+foreknowledge, such as comes only to men who have digged hard, hewing to
+the line, loyal to first principles. King had been loyal all his life.
+
+The difference between first principles and the other thing could hardly
+be better illustrated than by comparing Yasmini's position with his.
+From her point of view he had no ground to stand on, unless he should
+choose to come and stand on hers. She had men, ammunition, information.
+He had what he stood in, and his only information had been poured into
+his ears for her ends.
+
+Yet his heart sang inside him now; and he trusted it because that
+singing never had deceived him. He did not believe she would have left
+him alone at that state of affairs unless through over-confidence. It
+is one of the absolute laws that over-confidence begets blindness and
+mistakes.
+
+She had staked on what seemed to her the certainty of India's rising
+at the first signal of a holy war. She believed from close acquaintance
+that India was utterly disloyal, having made a study of disloyalty. And
+having read history she knew that many a conqueror has staked on such
+cards as hers, to win for lack of a better man to take the other side.
+
+But King had studied loyalty all his life, and he knew that besides
+being the home of money-lenders, thugs, and murderers, India is the very
+motherland of chivalry; that besides sedition she breeds gentlemen with
+stout hearts; that in addition to what one Christian Book calls “whoring
+after strange gods” India strives after purity. He knew that India's
+ideals are all imperishable, and her crimes but a kaleidoscopic phase.
+
+Not that he was analyzing thoughts just then. He was listening to the
+still small voice that told him half of his purpose was accomplished.
+He had probed Khinjan Caves, and knew the whole purpose for which the
+lawless thousands had been gathering and were gathering still. Remained,
+to thwart that purpose. And he had no more doubt of there being a means
+to thwart it than a mathematician has of the result of two times two,
+applied.
+
+Like a mathematician, he did not waste time and confuse issues by
+casting too far ahead, but began to devote himself steadily to the
+figures nearest. Knots are not untied by wholesale, but are conquered
+strand by strand. He began at the beginning, where he stood.
+
+He became conscious of human life near by and tip-toed to the door to
+look. A six-foot ledge of smooth rock ended just at the door and sloped
+in the other direction sharply downward toward another opening in the
+cliff side, three or four hundred yards away and two hundred feet lower
+down.
+
+Behind him in a corner at the back of the cave was a narrow fissure,
+hung with a leather curtain, that was doubtless the door into Khinjan's
+heart; but the only way to the outer air was along that ledge above a
+dizzying precipice, so high that the huge waterfall looked like a little
+stream below. He was in a very eagle's aerie; the upper rim of Khinjan's
+gorge seemed not more than a quarter of a mile above him.
+
+Round the corner, ten feet from the entrance, stood a guard, armed to
+the teeth, with a rifle, a sword, two pistols and a long curved Khyber
+knife stuck handy in his girdle. He spoke to the man and received no
+answer. He picked up a splinter of rock and threw it. The fellow looked
+at him then. He spoke again. The man transferred his rifle to the other
+hand and made signs with his free fingers. King looked puzzled. The man
+opened his mouth and showed that his tongue was missing. He had been
+made dumb, as pegs are made to fit square holes. King went in again, to
+wait on events and shudder.
+
+Nor did he have long to wait. There came a sound of grunting, up the
+rock path. Then footsteps. Then a hoarse voice, growling orders. He went
+out again to look, and beheld a little procession of women, led by
+a man. The man was armed, but the women were burdened with his own
+belongings--the medicine chest--his saddle and bridle--his unrifled
+mule-pack--and, wonder of wonders! the presents Khinjan's sick had given
+him, including money and weapons. They came past the dumb man on guard
+and laid them all at King's feet just inside the cave.
+
+He smiled, with that genial, face-transforming smile of his that has so
+often melted a road for him through sullen crowds. But the man in charge
+of the women did not grin. He was suffering. He growled at the women,
+and they went away like obedient animals, to sit half-way down the ledge
+and await further orders. He himself made as if to follow them, and the
+dumb man on guard did not pay much attention; he let women and man pass
+behind him, stepping one pace forward toward the edge to make more room.
+That was his last entirely voluntary act in this world.
+
+With a suddenness that disarmed all opposition the other humped himself
+against the wall and bucked into the dumb man's back, sending him,
+weapons and all, hurtling over the precipice. With a wild effort to
+recover, and avenge himself, and do his duty, the victim fired his
+rifle, that was ready cocked. The bullet struck the rock above and
+either split or shook a great fragment loose, that hurtled down after
+him, so that he and the stone made a race of it for the waterfall and
+the caverns into which the water tumbled thousands of feet away. The
+other ruffian spat after him, and then walked back to where King stood.
+
+“Now heal me my boils!” he said, grinning at last, doubtless from
+pleasure at the prospect. He was the same man who had stood on guard at
+the “guest-cave” when Ismail led King out to see the Cavern of Earth's
+Drink.
+
+The temptation was to fling the brute after his victim. The temptation
+always is to do the wrong thing--to cap wrath with wrath, injustice with
+vengeance. That way wars begin and are never ended. King beckoned
+him into the cave, and bent over the chest of medical supplies. Then,
+finding the light better for his purpose at the entrance, he called the
+man back and made him sit down on the box.
+
+The business of lancing boils is not especially edifying in itself; but
+that particular minor operation probably saved India. But for hope of
+it the man with boils would never have stood two turns on guard hand
+running and let the relief sleep on; so he would not have been on duty
+when the message came to carry King's belongings to his new cave of
+residence. There would have been no object in killing the dumb man and
+so there would have been an expert with a loaded rifle to keep Muhammad
+Anim lurking down the trail.
+
+Muhammad Anim came--like the devil to scotch King's faith. He had
+followed the women with the loads. He stood now, like a big bear on a
+mountain track, swaying his head from side to side six feet away from
+King, watching the boils succumb to treatment. He grunted when the job
+was finished, and King jumped, nearly driving the lance into a new place
+in his patient's neck.
+
+“Let him go!” growled Muhammad Anim. “Go thou! Stand guard over the
+women until I come!”
+
+The mullah turned a rifle this way and that in his paws, like a great
+bear dancing. The Mahsudi with a sore neck could have shot him perhaps,
+but there are men with whom only the bravest dare try conclusions. In
+cold gray dawn it would have needed a martinet to make a firing squad
+do execution on Muhammad Anim, even with his hands tied and his back
+against a wall. A man whose boils had just been lanced was no match for
+him at all, even in broad daylight. The Hillman slunk away and did as he
+was told.
+
+“What meant thy message?” growled the mullah. “There came a Pathan to me
+in the Cavern of Earth's Drink with word that yonder sits a hakim. What
+of it?”
+
+King had almost forgotten the message he had sent to Muhammad Anim in
+the Cavern of Earth's Drink. But that was not why his eyes looked past
+the mullah's now, nor why he did not answer. The mullah did not look
+round, for he knew what was happening.
+
+The very Orakzai Pathan who had sat next King in the Cavern of Earth's
+Drink, and who had carried the message for him, was creeping up behind
+the women and already had his rifle leveled at the man with boils.
+
+“Aye!” said the mullah, watching King's eyes. “He has done well, and the
+road is clear!”
+
+The man with boils offered no fight. He dropped his rifle and threw his
+hands up. In a moment the Orakzai Pathan was in command of two rifles,
+holding them in one hand and nodding and making signs to King from
+among the women, whom he seemed to regard as his plunder too. The women
+appeared supremely indifferent in any event. King nodded back to him.
+A friend is a friend in the “Hills,” and rare is the man who spares his
+enemy.
+
+“Why send that message to me?” asked Muhammad Anim.
+
+“Why not?” asked King. “If none know where the hakim is, how shall the
+hakim earn a living?”
+
+“None comes to earn a living in the Hills,” growled the mullah, swaying
+his head slowly and devouring King with cruel calculating eyes. “Why art
+thou here?”
+
+“I slew a man,” said King.
+
+“Thou liest! It was my men who got the head that let thee in! Speak! Why
+art thou here?”
+
+But King did not answer. The mullah resumed.
+
+“He who brought me the message yesterday says he has it from another,
+who had it from a third, that thou art here because she plans a
+simultaneous rising in India, and thou art from the Punjab where the
+Sikhs all wait to rise. Is that true?”
+
+“Thy man said it,” answered King.
+
+“What sayest thou?” the mullah asked.
+
+“I say nothing,” said King.
+
+“Then hear me!” said the mullah. “Listen, thou.” But he did not begin
+to speak yet. He tried to see past King into the cave and to peer about
+into the shadows.
+
+“Where is she?” he asked. “Her man Rewa Gunga went yesterday, with three
+men and a letter to carry, down the Khyber. But where is she?”
+
+So he had slept the clock round! King did not answer. He blocked the way
+into the cave and looked past the mullah at a sight that fascinated, as
+a serpent's eyes are said to fascinate a bird. But the mullah, who knew
+perfectly well what must be happening, did not trouble to turn his head.
+
+The Orakzai Pathan crouched among the women, and the women grinned. The
+Mahsudi, having surrendered and considering himself therefore absolved
+from further responsibility at least for the present, spat over the
+precipice and fingered gingerly the sore place where his boils had been.
+He yawned and dropped both hands to his side; and it was at that instant
+that the Pathan sprang at him.
+
+With arms like the jaws of a vise he pinned the Mahsudi's to his side,
+and lifted him from off his feet. The fellow screamed, and the Pathan
+shouted “Ho!” But he did no murder yet. He let his victim grow fully
+conscious of the fate in store for him, holding him so that his frantic
+kicks were squandered on thin air. He turned him slowly, until he was
+upside-down; and so, perpendicular, face-outward, he hove him forward
+like a dead log. He stood and watched his victim fall two or three
+thousand feet before troubling to turn and resume both rifles; and it
+was not until then, as if he had been mentally conscious of each move,
+that the mullah turned to look, and seeing only one man nodded.
+
+“Good!” he grunted. “'Shabash!”' (Well done!)
+
+Then he turned his head to stare into King's face, with the scrutiny of
+a trader appraising loot. Fire leaped up behind his calculating eyes.
+And without a word passing between them, King knew that this man as well
+as Yasmini was in possession of the secret of the Sleeper. Perhaps he
+knew it first; perhaps she snatched the keeping of the secret from him.
+At all events he knew it and recognized King's likeness to the Sleeper,
+for his eyes betrayed him. He began to stroke his beard monotonously
+with one hand. The rifle, that he pretended to be holding, really leaned
+against his back and with the free hand he was making signals.
+
+King knew well he was making signals. But he knew too that in Yasmini's
+power, her prisoner, he had no chance at all of interfering with her
+plans. Having grounded on the bottom of impotence, so to speak, any tide
+that would take him off must be a good tide. He pretended to be aware of
+nothing, and to be particularly unaware that the Pathan, with a rifle in
+each hand, was pretending to come casually up the path.
+
+In a minute he was covered by a rifle. In another minute the mullah had
+lashed his hands. In five minutes more the women were loaded again with
+his belongings and they were all half-way down the track in single file,
+the mullah bringing up the rear, descending backward with rifle ready
+against surprise, as if he expected Yasmini and her men to pounce out
+any minute to the rescue.
+
+They entered a tunnel and wound along it, stepping at short intervals
+over the bodies of three stabbed sentries. The Pathan spurned them with
+his heel as he passed. In the glare at the tunnel's mouth King tripped
+over the body of a fourth man and fell with his chin beyond the edge of
+a sheer precipice.
+
+They were on a ledge above the waterfall again, having come through
+a projection on the cliff's side, for Khinjan is all rat-runs and
+projections, like a sponge or a hornet's nest on a titanic scale.
+
+The Pathan laughed and came back to gather him like a sheaf of corn. The
+great smelly ruffian hugged him to himself as he set him on his feet.
+
+“Ah! Thou hakim!” he grinned. “There is no pain in my shoulder at all!
+Ask of me another favor when the time comes! Hey, but I am sick of
+Khinjan!”
+
+He gave King a shove along the path in the general direction of the
+mullah. Then he seized the dead body by the legs, and hurled it like a
+sling shot, watching it with a grin as it fell in a wide parabola. After
+that he took the dead man's rifle, and those of the three other dead
+men, that he had hidden in a crevice in the rock, and loaded them all on
+a woman in addition to King's saddle that she carried already.
+
+“Come!” he said. “Hurry, or Bull-with-a-beard yonder will remember us
+again. I love him best when he forgets!”
+
+They soon reached another cave, at which the mullah stopped. It was a
+dark ill-smelling hole, but he ordered King into it and the Pathan after
+him on guard, after first seeing the women pile all their loads
+inside. Then he took the women away and went off muttering to himself,
+swaggering, swinging his right arm as he strode, in a way few natives
+do.
+
+“Let us hope he has forgotten these!” the Pathan grinned, touching the
+pile of rifles. “Weight for weight in silver they will bring me a fine
+price! He may forget. He dreams. For a mullah he cares less for meat and
+money than any I ever saw. He is mad, I think. It is my opinion Allah
+touched him!”
+
+“What is that, under thy shirt?” King asked.
+
+The Pathan grinned, and undid the button. There was a second shirt
+underneath, and to that on the left breast were pinned two British
+medals.
+
+“Oh, yes!” he laughed. “I served the raj! I was in the army eleven
+years.”
+
+“Why did you leave it?” King asked, remembering that this man loved to
+hear his own voice.
+
+“Oh, I had furlough, and the bastard who stood next me in the ranks was
+the son of a dog with whom my father had a blood-feud. The blind fool
+did not know me. He received his furlough on the same day as I. I would
+not lay finger on him that side of the border, for we ate the same salt.
+I knifed him this side the border. It was no affair of the British. But
+I was seen, and I fled. And having slain a man, and having no doubt a
+report had gone back to the regiment, I entered this place. Except for a
+raid now and then to cool my blood I have been here ever since. It is a
+devil of a place.”
+
+Now the art of ruling India consists not in treading barefooted on
+scorpions--not in virtuous indignation at men who know no better--but in
+seeking for and making much of the gold that lies ever amid the dross.
+There is gold in the character of any man who once passed the grilling
+tests before enlistment in a British-Indian regiment. It may need
+experience to lay a finger on it, but it is surely there.
+
+“I heard,” said King, “as I came toward the Khyber in great haste (for
+the police were at my heels)--”
+
+“Ah, the police!” the Pathan grinned pleasantly.
+
+The inference was that at some time or other he had left his mark on the
+police.
+
+“I heard,” said King, “that men are flocking back to their old
+regiments.”
+
+“Aye, but not men with a price on their heads, little hakim!”
+
+“I could not say,” said King. To seem to know too much is as bad as to
+drink too much. “But I heard say that the sirkar has offered pardons to
+all deserters who return.”
+
+“Hah! The sirkar must be afraid. The sirkar needs men!”
+
+“For myself,” said King, “a whole skin in the 'Hills' seems better than
+one full of bullet holes in India.”
+
+“Hah! But thou art a hakim, not a soldier!”
+
+“True!” said King.
+
+“Tell me that again! Free pardons? Free pardons for all deserters?”
+
+“So I heard.”
+
+“Ah! But I was seen to slay a man of my own regiment.”
+
+“On this side the border or that?” asked King artfully.
+
+“On this side.”
+
+“Ah, but you were seen.”
+
+“Ay! But that is no man's business. In India I earned in my salt. I
+obeyed the law. There is no law here in the 'Hills.' I am minded to
+go back and seek that pardon! It would feel good to stand in the rank
+again, with a stiff-backed sahib out in front of me, and the thunder of
+the gun-wheels going by. The salt was good! Come thou with me!”
+
+“The pardon is for deserters,” King objected, “not for political
+offenders.”
+
+“Haugh!” said the Pathan, bringing down his flat hand hard on the
+hakim's thigh. “I will attend to that for thee. I will obtain my pardon
+first. Then will I lead thee by the hand to the karnal sahib and lie to
+him and say, 'This is the one who persuaded me against my will to come
+back to the regiment!”'
+
+“And he will believe? Nay, I would be afraid!” said King.
+
+“Would a pardon not be good?” the Pathan asked him. “A pardon and leave
+to swagger through the bazaars again and make trouble with the daughters
+and wives of fat traders--a pardon--Allah! It would be good to salute
+the karnal sahib again and see him raise a finger, thus; and to have
+the captain sahib call me a scoundrel--or some worse name if he loves me
+very much, for the English are a strange race--”
+
+“Thou art a dreamer!” said King. “Untie my hands; the thong cuts me.”
+ The Pathan obeyed.
+
+“Dreamer, am I? It is good to dream such dreams. By Allah, I've a mind
+to see that dream come true! I never slew a man on Indian soil, only in
+these 'Hills.' I will go to them and say 'Here I am! I am a deserter. I
+seek that pardon!' 'Truly I will go! Come thou with me, little hakim!”
+
+“Nay,” said King, “I have another thought.”
+
+“What then?”
+
+“You, who were seen to slay a man a yard this side of the border--”
+
+“Nay; half a mile this side!”
+
+“Half a mile, then. You who were seen to slay a fellow soldier of your
+regiment, and I who am a political offender, do not win pardons so
+easily as that.”
+
+“Would they hang us?”
+
+That was the first squeamishness the Pathan had shown of any kind,
+but men of his race would rather be tortured to death than hanged in a
+merciful hempen noose.
+
+“They would hang us,” said King, “unless we came bearing gifts.”
+
+“Gifts? Has Allah touched thee? What gifts should we bring? A dozen
+stolen rifles? A bag of silver? And I am the dreamer, am I?”
+
+“Nay,” said King. “I am the dreamer. I have seen a good vision.”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“There are others in these Hills--others in Khinjan who wear British
+medals?”
+
+The Pathan nodded.
+
+“How many?” asked King.
+
+“Hundreds. Men fight first on one side, then on the other, being true to
+either side while the contract lasts. In all there must be the makings
+of many regiments among the 'Hills.'”
+
+King nodded. He himself had seen the chieftains come to parley after
+the Tirah war. Most of them had worn British medals and had worn them
+proudly.
+
+“If we two,” he said, speaking slowly, “could speak with some of those
+men and stir the spirit in them and persuade them to feel as thou dost,
+mentioning the pardon for deserters and the probability of bonuses to
+the time-expired for reenlistment; if we could march down the Khyber
+with a hundred such, or even with fifty or with twenty-five or with
+a dozen men--we would receive our pardon for the sake of service
+rendered.”
+
+“Good!”
+
+The Pathan thumped him on the back so hard that his eyes watered.
+
+“We would have to use much caution,” King advised him, when he was able
+to speak again.
+
+“Aye! If Bull-with-a-beard got wind of it he would have us crucified.
+And if she heard of it--”
+
+He was silent. Apparently there were no words in his tongue that could
+compass his dread of her revenge. He was silent for ten minutes,
+and King sat still beside him, letting memory of other days do its
+work--memory of the long, clean regimental lines, and of order and
+decency and of justice handed out to all and sundry by gentlemen who did
+not think themselves too good to wear a native regiment's uniform.
+
+“In two days I could do the drill again as well as ever,” he said at
+last. Then there was silence again for fifteen minutes more. “I could
+always shoot,” he murmured; “I could always shoot.”
+
+When Muhammad Anim came back they had both forgotten to replace the
+lashing on King's wrists, but the mullah seemed not to notice it.
+
+“Come!” he ordered, with a sidewise jerk of his great ugly head, and
+then stood muttering impatiently while they obeyed.
+
+He had twice the number of women with him, but none of them the same;
+and he had brought five ruffians to guard them, who pounced on the
+captured rifles and claimed one apiece, to the Pathan's loud-growled
+disgust. Then the women were made to gather up King's belongings, and at
+a word from the mullah they started in single file--the mullah leading,
+then two men, then King, then the Orakzai Pathan, and then the other
+three. The Pathan began to whisper busily to the man next behind and
+noticing that King looked straight forward and contented himself; his
+heart was singing within him unexplainedly; he wanted to sing and dance,
+as once David did before the ark. He did not feel in the least like a
+prisoner.
+
+They marched downward through interminable tunnels and along ledges
+poised between earth and heaven, until they came at last to the tunnel
+leading to the one entrance into Khinjan Caves. Just before they entered
+it two more of the mullah's men came up with them, leading horses. One
+horse was for the mullah, and they helped King mount the other, showing
+him more respect than is usually shown a prisoner in the “Hills.”
+
+Then the mullah led the way into the tunnel, and he seemed in deadly
+fear. The echo of the hoof-beats irritated him. He eyed each hole in the
+roof as if Yasmini might be expected to shoot down at him or drench him
+with boiling oil and hurried past each of them at a trot, only to draw
+rein immediately afterward because the noise was too great.
+
+It became evident that his men had been at work here too, for at
+intervals along the passage lay dead bodies. Yasmini must have posted
+the men there, but where was she? Each of them lay dead with a knife
+wound in his back, and the mullah's men possessed themselves of rifles
+and knives and cartridges, wiping off blood that had scarcely cooled
+yet.
+
+When they came to the end of the tunnel it was to find the door into
+the mosque open in front of them, and twenty more of Muhammad Anim's men
+standing guard over the eyelashless mullah. They had bound and gagged
+him. At a word from Muhammad Anim they loosed him; and at a threat the
+hairless one gave a signal that brought the great stone door sliding
+forward on its oiled bronze grooves.
+
+Then, with a dozen jests thrown to the hairless one for consolation, and
+an utter indifference to the sacredness of the mosque floor, they sought
+outer air, and Muhammad Anim led them up the Street of the Dwellings
+toward Khinjan's outer ramparts. They reached the outer gate without
+incident and hurried into the great dry valley beyond it. As they rode
+across the valley the mullah thumbed a long string of beads. Unlike
+Yasmini, he was praying to one god; but he seemed to have many prayers.
+His back was a picture of determined treachery--the backs of his men
+were expressions of the creed that “He shall keep who can!” King rode
+all but last now and had a good view of their unconsciously vaunted
+blackguardism. There was not a hint of honor or tenderness among the
+lot, man, woman or mullah. Yet his heart sang within him as if he were
+riding to his own marriage feast!
+
+Last of all, close behind him, marched his friend, the Orakzai Pathan,
+and as they picked their way among the boulders across the mile-wide
+moat the two contrived to fall a little to the rear. The Pathan began
+speaking in a whisper and King, riding with lowered head as if he were
+studying the dangerous track, listened with both ears.
+
+“She sent her man Rewa Gunga toward the Khyber with a message,” he
+whispered. “He took a few men with him, and he is to send them with the
+message when they reach the Khyber, but he is to come back. All he
+went for is to make sure the message is not intercepted, for
+Bull-with-a-beard is growing reckless these days. He knew what was doing
+and said at once that she is treating with the British, but there were
+few who believed that. There are more who wonder where she hides while
+the message is on its way. None has seen her. Men have swarmed into the
+Cavern of Earth's Drink and howled for her, but she did not come. Then
+the mullah went to look for his ammunition that he stored and sealed in
+a cave. And it was gone. It was all gone. And there was no proof of who
+had taken it!
+
+“Hakim, there be some who say--and Bull-with-a-beard is one of
+them--that she is afraid and hides. Men say she fears vengeance for the
+stolen ammunition, because it was plenty for a conquest of India. So men
+say. So say these here, for I have asked them.”
+
+“And thou?” asked King, struggling to keep the note of exultation from
+his voice. He did not believe she was hiding. She might be staring into
+a crystal in some secret cave--she might be planning new mischief of any
+kind. But afraid she was surely not. And just as surely he could vow she
+was working out her own undoing.
+
+“I?” said the Pathan. “I swear she is afraid of nothing. If she has
+taken all the ammunition, then we shall hear from it again and from her
+too!”
+
+“And what of me?” asked King. “What will the mullah do with me?”
+
+“His men say he is desperate. His own are losing faith in him. He
+snatched thee to be a bait for her, having it in mind that a man whom
+she hides in her private part of Khinjan must be of great value to her.
+He has sworn to have thee skinned alive on a hot rock should she fail to
+come to terms!”
+
+That being not such a comforting reflection, King rode in silence for
+a while, with the Pathan trudging solemnly beside his stirrup keeping
+semblance of guard over him. When they reached the steep escarpment he
+had to dismount, although the mullah in the lead tried to make his own
+beast carry him up the lower spur and was mad--angry with his men for
+laughing when the horse fell back with him.
+
+Far in the rear King and the Pathan shoved and hauled and nearly lost
+their horse a dozen times at that. But once at the top the mullah set a
+furious pace and the laden women panted in their efforts to keep up, the
+men taking less notice of them than if they had been animals.
+
+The march went on in single file until the sun died down in splendid
+fury. Then there began to be a wind that they had to lean against, but
+the women were allowed no rest.
+
+At last at a place where the trail began to widen, the mullah beckoned
+King to ride beside him. It was not that he wished to be communicative,
+but there were things King knew that he did not know, and he had his own
+way of asking questions.
+
+“Damned hakim!” he growled. “Pill-man! Poulticer! That is a sweeper's
+trade of thine! Thou shalt apply it at my camp! I have some wounded and
+some sick.”
+
+King did not answer, but buttoned his coat closer against the keen wind.
+The mullah mistook the shudder for one of another kind.
+
+“Did she choose thee only for thy face?” he asked. “Did she not consider
+thy courage? Does she love thee well enough to ransom thee?”
+
+Again King did not answer, but he watched the mullah's face keenly in
+the dark and missed nothing of its expression. He decided the man was in
+doubt---even racked by indecision.
+
+“Should she not ransom thee, hakim, thou shall have a chance to show
+my men how a man out of India can die! By and by I will lend thee a
+messenger to send to her. Better make the message clear and urgent!
+Thou shalt state my terms to her and plead thine own cause in the same
+letter. My camp lies yonder.”
+
+He motioned with one sweep of his arm toward a valley that lay in shadow
+far below them. As far as the slope leading down to it was visible in
+the moonlight it was littered with what the “Hills” call “hell-stones,”
+ that will neither lie flat nor keep on rolling, and are dangerous to man
+and beast alike. Nothing else could be made out through the darkness but
+a few twisted tamarisk trees, that served to make the savagery yet more
+savage and the loneliness more desolate. The gloom below the trees was
+that of the very underdepths of hell itself.
+
+The mullah pointed to a rock that rose like a shadow from the deeper
+blackness.
+
+“Yes,” said King, “I have seen.” And the mullah stared at him. Then he
+shouted, and the top of the rock turned into a man, who gave them leave
+to advance, leaning on his rifle as one who had assured himself of their
+identity long minutes ago.
+
+As they approached it the rock clove in two and became two great
+pillars, with a man on each. And between the pillars they looked down
+into a valley lit by fires that burned before a thousand hide tents,
+with shadows by the hundred flitting back and forth between them. A dull
+roar, like the voice of an army, rose out of the gorge.
+
+“More than four thousand men!” said the mullah proudly.
+
+“What are four thousand for a raid into India?” sneered King, greatly
+daring.
+
+“Wait and see!” growled the mullah; but he seemed depressed.
+
+He led the way downward, getting off his horse and giving the reins to
+a man. King copied him, and part-way sliding, part stumbling down they
+found their way along the dry bed of a water-course between two spurs
+of a hillside, until they stood at last in the midst of a cluster of a
+dozen sentries, close to a tamarisk to which a man's body hung spiked.
+That the man had been spiked to it alive was suggested by the body's
+attitude.
+
+Without a word to the sentries the mullah led on down a lane through the
+midst of the camp, toward a great open cave at the far side, in which a
+bonfire cast fitful light and shadow. Watchers sitting by the thousand
+tents yawned at them, but took no particular notice.
+
+The mouth of the cave was like a lion's, fringed with teeth. There were
+men in it, ten or eleven of them, all armed, squatting round the fire.
+
+“Get out!” growled the mullah. But they did not obey. They sat and
+stared at him.
+
+“Have ye tents?” the mullah asked, in a voice like thunder.
+
+“Aye!” But they did not go yet.
+
+One of the men, he nearest the mullah, got on his feet, but he had to
+step back a pace, for the mullah would not give ground and their breath
+was in each other's faces.
+
+“Where are the bombs? And the rifles? And the many cartridges?” he
+demanded. “We have waited long, Muhammad Anim. Where are they now?”
+
+The others got up, to lend the first man encouragement. They leaned on
+rifles and surrounded the mullah, so that King could only get a glimpse
+of him between them. They seemed in no mood to be treated cavalierly--in
+no mood to be argued with. And the Mullah did not argue.
+
+“Ye dogs!” he growled at them, and he strode through them to the fire
+and chose himself a good, thick burning brand. “Ye sons of nameless
+mothers!”
+
+Then he charged them suddenly, beating them over head and face and
+shoulders, driving them in front of him, utterly reckless of their
+rifles. His own rifle lay on the ground behind him, and King kicked its
+stock clear of the fire.
+
+“Oh, I shall pray for you this night!” Muhammad Anim snarled. “What a
+curse I shall beg for you! Oh, what a burning of the bowels ye shall
+have! What a sickness! What running of the eyes! What sores! What boils!
+What sleepless nights and faithless women shall be yours! What a prayer
+I will pray to Allah!”
+
+They scattered into outer gloom before his rage, and then came back
+to kneel to him and beg him withdraw his curse. He kicked them as they
+knelt and drove them away again. Then, silhouetted in the cave mouth,
+with the glow of the fire behind him, he stood with folded arms and
+dared them shoot. He lacked little in that minute of being a full-grown
+brute at bay. King admired him, with reservations.
+
+After five minutes of angry contemplation of the camp he turned on a
+contemptuous heel and came back to the fire, throwing on more fuel from
+a great pile in a corner. There was an iron pot in the embers. He seized
+a stick and stirred the contents furiously, then set the pot between
+his knees and ate like an animal. He passed the pot to King when he had
+finished, but fingers had passed too many times through what was left in
+it and the very thought of eating the mess made his gorge rise; so King
+thanked him and set the pot aside.
+
+Then, “That is thy place!” Muhammad Anim growled, pointing over his
+shoulder to a ledge of rock, like a shelf in the far wall. There was a
+bed upon it, of cotton blankets stuffed with dry grass. King walked over
+and felt the blankets and found them warm from the last man who had lain
+there. They smelt of him too. He lifted them and laughed. Taking the
+whole in both hands he carried it to the fire and threw it in, and the
+sudden blaze made the mullah draw away a yard; but it did not make him
+speak.
+
+“Bugs!” King explained, but the mullah showed no interest. He watched,
+however, as King went back to the bed, and subsequent proceedings seemed
+to fascinate him.
+
+Out of the chest that one of the women had set down King took soap.
+There was a pitcher of water between him and the fire; he carried it
+nearer. With an improvised scrubbing brush of twigs he proceeded to
+scrub every inch of the rock-shelf, and when he had done and had dried
+it more or less, he stripped and began to scrub himself.
+
+“Who taught thee thy squeamishness?” the mullah asked at last, getting
+up and coming nearer. It was well that King's skin was dark (although
+it was many shades lighter than his face, that had been stained so
+carefully). The mullah eyed him from head to foot and looked awfully
+suspicious, but something prompted King and he answered without an
+instant's hesitation.
+
+“Why ask a woman's questions?” he retorted. “Only women ask when they
+know the answer. When I watched thee with the firebrand a short while
+ago, oh, mullah, I mistook thee for a man.”
+
+The mullah grunted and began to tug his beard. But King said no more and
+went on washing himself.
+
+“I forgot,” said the mullah then, “that thou art her pet. She would not
+love thee unless thy smell was sweet.”
+
+“No,” said King quite cheerfully--going it blind, for he did not know
+what had possessed him to take that line, but knew he might as well be
+hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. “No, if I stank like thee she would not
+love me.”
+
+The mullah snorted and went back to the fire, but he took King's cake of
+soap with him and sat examining it.
+
+“Tauba!” he swore suddenly as if he had made a gruesome discovery. “Such
+filthy stuff is made from the fat of pigs!”
+
+“Doubtless!” said King. “That is why she uses it, and why I use it. She
+is a better Muhammadan than thou. She would surely cleanse her skin with
+the fat of pigs!”
+
+“Thou art a shameless one!” said the mullah, shaking his head like a
+bear.
+
+“I am what Allah made me!” answered King, and then, for the sake of the
+impression, he went through the outward form of muslim prayer, spreading
+a mat and omitting none of the genuflections. When he had finished he
+unfolded his own blankets that a woman had thrown down beside the chest
+and spread them carefully on the rock-shelf. But though he was allowed
+to climb up and lie there, he was not allowed to sleep--nor did he want
+to sleep--for more than an hour to come.
+
+The mullah came over from the fire again and stood beside him, glaring
+like a great animal and grumbling in his beard.
+
+“Does she surely love thee?” he asked at last, and King nodded, because
+he knew he was on the trail of information.
+
+“So thou art to ape the Sleeper in his bronze mail, eh? Thou art to
+come to life, as she was said to come to life, and the two of you are to
+plunder India? Is that it?”
+
+King nodded again, for a nod is less committal than a word; and the nod
+was enough to start the mullah off again.
+
+“I saw the Sleeper and his bride before she knew of either! It was I who
+let her into Khinjan! It was I who told the men she is the 'Heart of
+the Hills' come to life! She tricked me! But this is no hour for bearing
+grudges. She has a plan and I am minded to help.”
+
+King lay still and looked up at him, sure that treachery was the
+ultimate end of any plan the mullah Muhammad Anim had. India has been
+saved by the treachery of her enemies more often than ruined by false
+friends. So has the world, for that matter.
+
+“A jihad when the right hour comes will raise the tribes,” the mullah
+growled. “She and thou, as the Sleeper and his mate, could work
+wonders. But who can trust her? She stole that head! She stole all the
+ammunition! Does she surely love thee?”
+
+King nodded again, for modesty could not help him at that juncture. Love
+and boastfulness go together in the “Hills.”
+
+“She shall have thee back, then, at a price!”
+
+King did not answer. His brown eyes watched the mullah's, and he drew
+his breath in little jerks, lest by breathing aloud he should miss one
+word of what, was coming.
+
+“She shall have thee back against Khinjan and the ammunition! She and
+thou shall have India, but I shall be the power behind you! She must
+give me Khinjan and the ammunition! She must admit me to the inner
+caves, whence her damned guards expelled me. I must have the reins in my
+two hands so! Then, thou and she shall have the pomp and glitter while I
+guide!”
+
+King did not answer.
+
+“Dost understand?”
+
+King murmured something unintelligible.
+
+“Otherwise, I and my men will storm Khinjan, and she and thou shall go
+down into Earth's Drink lashed together!”
+
+King shuddered, not because he felt afraid, but because some instinct
+told him to make the mullah think him afraid. He was far too interested
+to be fearful.
+
+“Ye shall both be tortured before the plunge into the river! She shall
+be tortured in the Cavern of Earth's Drink before the men!”
+
+King shuddered again, this time without an effort. He could imagine the
+thousands watching grimly while the flayer used his knife.
+
+“I have men in Khinjan! I have as many as she! On the day I march there
+will be a revolt within. She would better agree to terms!”
+
+King lay looking at him, like a prisoner on the rack undergoing
+examination. He did not answer.
+
+“Write thou a letter. Since she loves thee, state thine own case to her.
+Tell her that I hold thee hostage, and that Khinjan is mine already for
+a little fighting. In a month she can not pick out my men from among
+her own. Her position is undermined. Tell her that. Tell her that if she
+obeys she shall have India and be queen. If she disobeys, she shall die
+in the Cavern of Earth's Drink!”
+
+“She is a proud woman, mullah,” answered King. “Threats to such as
+she--?”
+
+The mullah mumbled and strode back and forth three times between King's
+bed and the fire, with his fists knotted together behind him and his
+head bent, as Napoleon used to walk. When he stood beside the bed again
+at last it was with his mind made up, as his clenched fists and his eyes
+indicated.
+
+“Make thine own terms with her!” he growled. “Write the letter and send
+it! I hold thee; she holds Khinjan and the ammunition. I am between her
+and India. So be it. She shall starve in there! She shall lie in there
+until the war is over and take what terms are offered her in the end!
+Write thine own letter! State the case, and bid her answer!”
+
+“Very well,” said King. He began to see now definitely how India was to
+be saved. It was none of his business to plan yet, but to help others'
+plans destroy themselves and to sow such seed in the broken ground as
+might bear fruit in time.
+
+The mullah left him, to squat and gaze into the fire, and mutter, and
+King lay still. After a while the mullah went and carried a great water
+bowl nearer to the fire and, as King had done, stripped himself. Then he
+heaped great fagots on the fire--wasteful fagots, each of which had cost
+some woman hours of mountain climbing. And in the glow of the leaping
+flame he scrubbed himself from head to foot with King's soap. Finally,
+with a feat of strength that nearly forced an exclamation out of King,
+he lifted the great water bowl in both hands and emptied the whole
+contents over himself. Then he resumed his smelly garments without
+troubling to dry his body, and got out a Quran from a corner and began
+to read it in a nasal singsong that would have kept dead men awake. King
+lay and watched and listened.
+
+Reading scripture only seemed to fire the mullah's veins. For him sleep
+was either out of reach or despicable, perhaps both. He seemed in a mood
+to despise anything but conquest and strode back and forth up and down
+the cave like a caged bear, muttering to himself.
+
+After a time he went to the mouth of the cave, to stand and stare out
+at the camp where the thousand fires were dying fitfully and wood smoke
+purged the air of human nastiness. The stars looked down on him, and he
+seemed to try to read them, standing with fists knotted together at his
+back.
+
+And as he stood so, six other mullahs came to him and began to argue
+with him in low tones, he browbeating them all with furious words hissed
+between half-closed teeth. They were whispering still when King fell
+asleep. It was courage, not carelessness, that let him sleep--courage
+and a great hope born of the mullah's perplexity.
+
+He dreamed that he was writing, writing, writing, while the torturers
+made a hot fire ready in the Cavern of Earth's Drink and whetted knives
+on the bridge end while the organ played The Marseillaise. He dreamed
+Yasmini came to him and whispered the solution to it all, but what she
+whispered he could not catch, although she whispered the same words
+again and again and seemed to be angry with him for not listening.
+
+And when he awoke at last he had fragments of his blanket in either
+hand, and the sun was already shining into the jaws of the cave. The
+camp was alive and reeked of cooking food. But the mullah was gone, and
+so was all the money the women had brought, together with his medicines
+and things from Khinjan.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII
+
+
+
+     When the last evil jest has been made, and the rest
+     Of the ink of hypocrisy spilt,
+     When the awfully right have elected to fight
+     Lest their own should discover their guilt;
+     When the door has been shut on the “if” and the “but”
+      And it's up to the men with the guns,
+     On their knees in that day let diplomatists pray
+     For forgiveness from prodigal sons.
+
+
+Instead of the mullah, growling texts out of a Quran on his lap, the
+Orakzai Pathan sat and sunned himself in the cave mouth, emitting
+worldlier wisdom unadulterated with divinity. As King went toward him
+to see to whom he spoke he grinned and pointed with his thumb, and King
+looked down on some sick and wounded men who sat in a crowd together on
+the ramp, ten feet or so below the cave.
+
+They seemed stout soldierly fellows. Men of another type were being kept
+at a distance by dint of argument and threats. Away in the distance was
+Muhammad Anim with his broad back turned to the cave, in altercation
+with a dozen other mullahs. For the time he was out of the reckoning.
+
+“Some of these are wounded,” the Pathan explained. “Some have sores.
+Some have the belly ache. Then again, some are sick of words, hot and
+cold by day and night. All have served in the army. All have medals.
+All are deserters, some for one reason, some for another and some for no
+reason at all. Bull-with-a-beard looks the other way. Speak thou to them
+about the pardon that is offered!”
+
+So King went down among them, taking some of the tools of his supposed
+trade with him and trying to crowd down the triumph that would well up.
+The seed he had sown had multiplied by fifty in a night. He wanted to
+shout, as men once did before the walls of Jericho.
+
+A man bared a sword cut. He bent over him, and if the mullah had turned
+to look there would have been no ground for suspicion. So in a voice
+just loud enough to reach them all, he repeated what he had told the
+Pathan the day before.
+
+“But who art thou?” asked one of them suspiciously. Perhaps there had
+been a shade too much cocksureness in the hakim's voice, but he acted
+faultlessly when he answered. Voice, accent, mannerism, guilty pride,
+were each perfect.
+
+“Political offender. My brother yonder in the cave mouth”--(The Pathan
+smirked. He liked the imputation)--“suggested I seek pardon, too.
+He thinks if I persuade many to apply for pardon then the sirkar may
+forgive me for service rendered.”
+
+The Pathan's smirk grew to a grin. He liked grandly to have the notion
+fathered on himself; and his complacency of course was suggestive of the
+hakim's trustworthiness. But the East is ever cautious.
+
+“Some say thou art a very great liar,” remarked a man with half a nose.
+
+“Nay,” answered King. “Liar I may be, but I am one against many. Which
+of you would dare stand alone and lie to all the others? Nay, sahibs, I
+am a political offender, not a soldier!”
+
+They all laughed at that and seizing the moment when they were in a
+pliant mood the Orakzai Pathan proceeded to bring proposals to a head.
+
+“Are we agreed?” he asked. “Or have we waggled our beards all night long
+in vain? Take him with us, say I. Then, if pardons are refused us he at
+least will gain nothing by it. We can plunge our knives in him first,
+whatever else happens.”
+
+“Aye!”
+
+That was reasonable and they approved in chorus. Possibility of pardon
+and reinstatement, though only heard of at second hand, had brought
+unity into being. And unity brought eagerness.
+
+“Let us start to-night!” urged one man, and nobody hung back.
+
+“Aye! Aye! Aye!” they chorused. And eagerness, as always in the “Hills,”
+ brought wilder counsel in its wake.
+
+“Who dare stab Bull-with-a-beard? He has sought blood and has let blood.
+Let him drink his own.”
+
+“Aye!”
+
+“Nay! He is too well guarded.”
+
+“Not he!”
+
+“Let us stab him and take his head with us; there well may be a price on
+it.”
+
+They took a vote on it and were agreed; but that did not suit King at
+all, whatever Muhammad Anim's personal deserts might be. To let him be
+stabbed would be to leave Yasmini without a check on her of any kind,
+and then might India defend herself! Yet to leave the mullah and Yasmini
+both at large would be almost equally dangerous, for they might form an
+alliance. There must be some other way, and he set out to gain time.
+
+“Nay, nay, sahibs!” he urged. “Nay, nay!”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“Sahibs, I have wife and children in Lahore. Same are most dear to me
+and I to them. I find it expedient to make great effort for my pardon.
+Ye are but fifty. Ye are less than fifty. Nay, let us gather a hundred
+men.”
+
+“Who shall find a hundred?” somebody demanded, and there was a chorus of
+denial. “We be all in this camp who ate the salt.”
+
+It was plain, though, that his daring to hold out only gave them the
+more confidence in him.
+
+“But Khinjan,” he objected. The crimes of the Khinjan men were not to
+the point. Time had to be gained.
+
+“Aye,” they agreed. “There be many in Khinjan!” Mere mention of the
+place made them regard Orakzai Pathan and hakim with new respect, as
+having right of entry through the forbidden gate.
+
+“Then I have it!” the Pathan announced at once, for he was awake to
+opportunity. “Many of you can hardly march. Rest ye here and let the
+hakim treat your belly aches. Bull-with-a-beard bade me wait here for a
+letter that must go to Khinjan to-day. Good. I will take his letter.
+And in Khinjan I will spread news about pardons. It is likely there are
+fifty there who will dare follow me back, and then we shall march down
+the Khyber like a full company of the old days! Who says that is not a
+good plan?”
+
+There were several who said it was not, but they happened to have
+nothing the matter with them and could have marched at once. The rest
+were of the other way of thinking and agreed in asserting that Khinjan
+men were a higher caste of extra-ultra murderers whose presence
+doubtless would bring good luck to the venture. These prevailed after
+considerable argument.
+
+Strangely enough, none of them deemed the proposition beneath Khinjan
+men's consideration. Pardon and leave to march again behind British
+officers loomed bigger in their eyes than the green banner of the
+Prophet, which could only lead to more outrageous outlawry. They knew
+Khinjan men were flesh and blood--humans with hearts--as well as they.
+But caution had a voice yet.
+
+“She will catch thee in Khinjan Caves,” suggested the man with part of
+his nose missing. “She will have thee flayed alive!”
+
+“Take note then, I bequeath all the women in the world to thee! Be thou
+heir to my whole nose, too, and a blessing!” laughed the Pathan, and
+the butt of the jest spat savagely. In the “Hills” there is only one
+explanation given as to how one lost his nose, and they all laughed like
+hyenas until the mullah Muhammad Anim came rolling and striding back.
+
+By that time King had got busy with his lancet, but the mullah called
+him off and drove the crowd away to a distance; then he drove King into
+the cave in front of him, his mouth working as if he were biting bits of
+vengeance off for future use.
+
+“Write thy letter, thou! Write thy letter! Here is paper. There is a
+pen--take it! Sit! Yonder is ink--ttutt--ttutt!--Write, now, write!”
+
+King sat at a box and waited, as if to take dictation, but the mullah,
+tugging at his beard, grew furious.
+
+“Write thine own letter! Invent thine own argument! Persuade her, or die
+in a new way! I will invent a new way for thee!”
+
+So King began to write, in Urdu, for reasons of his own. He had spoken
+once or twice in Urdu to the mullah and had received no answer. At the
+end of ten minutes he handed up what he had written, and Muhammad Anim
+made as if to read it, trying to seem deliberate, and contriving to look
+irresolute. It was a fair guess that he hated to admit ignorance of the
+scholars' language.
+
+“Are there any alterations you suggest?” King asked him.
+
+“Nay, what care I what the words are? If she be not persuaded, the worse
+for thee!”
+
+He held it out, and as he took it King contrived to tear it; he also
+contrived to seem ashamed of his own clumsiness.
+
+“I will copy it out again,” he said.
+
+The mullah swore at him, and conceiving that some extra show of
+authority was needful, growled out:
+
+“Remember all I said. Set down she must surrender Khinjan Caves or I
+swear by Allah I will have thee tortured with fire and thorns--and her,
+too, when the time comes!”
+
+Now he had said that, or something very like it, in the first letter.
+There was no doubt left that the Mullah was trying to hide ignorance,
+as men of that fanatic ambitious mold so often will at the expense of
+better judgment. If fanatics were all-wise, it would be a poor world for
+the rest.
+
+“Very well,” King said quietly. And with great pretense of copying the
+other letter out on fresh paper he now wrote what he wished to say,
+taking so long about it (for he had to weigh each word), that the mullah
+strode up and down the cave swearing and kicking things over.
+
+        “Greeting,”' he wrote, “to the most beautiful and very
+        wise Princess Yasmini, in her palace in the Caves in
+        Khinjan, from her servant Kurram Khan the hakim, in
+        the camp of the mullah Muhammad Anim, a night's march
+        distant in the hills.
+
+        “The mullah Muhammad Anim makes his stand and demands
+        now surrender to himself of Khinjan Caves; and of all
+        his ammunition.  Further, he demands full control of
+        you and of me and of all your men.  He is ready to
+        fight for his demands and already--as you must well
+        know--he has considerable following in Khinjan Caves.
+        He has at least as many men as you have, and he has
+        four thousand more here.
+
+        “He threatens as a preliminary to blockade Khinjan
+        Caves, unless the answer to this prove favorable,
+        letting none enter, but calling his own men out to
+        join him.  This would suit the Indian government,
+        because while the 'Hills' fight among themselves
+        they can not raid India, and while he blockades
+        Khinjan Caves there will be time to move against him.
+
+        “Knowing that he dares begin and can accomplish what
+        he threatens, I am sorry;  because I know it is said
+        how many services you have rendered of old to the
+        government I serve.  We who serve one raj are One--one
+        to remember--one to forget--one to help each other in
+        good time.
+
+        “I have not been idle.  Some of Muhammad Anim's men
+        are already mine.  With them I can return to India,
+        taking information with me that will serve my government.
+        My men are eager to be off.
+
+        “It may be that vengeance against me would seem sweeter
+        to you than return to your former allegiance.  In that
+        case, Princess, you only need betray me to the mullah,
+        and be sure my death would leave nothing to be desired
+        by the spectators.  At present he does not suspect me.
+
+        “Be assured, however, that not to betray me to him is
+        to leave me free to serve my government and well able
+        to do so.
+
+        “I invite you to return to India with me, bearing news
+        that the mullah Muhammad Anim and his men are bottled
+        in Khinjan Caves, and to plan with me to that end.
+
+        “If you will, then write an answer to Muhammad Anim,
+        not in Urdu, but in a language he can understand;  seem
+        to surrender to him.  But to me send a verbal message,
+        either by the bearer of this or by some trustier messenger.
+
+        “India can profit yet by your service if you will.  And
+        in that case I pledge my word to direct the government's
+        attention only to your good service in the matter.  It is
+        not yet too late to choose.  It is not impertinent in me
+        to urge you.
+
+        “Nor can I say how gladly I would subscribe myself your
+        grateful and loyal servant.”
+
+The mullah pounced on the finished letter, pretended to read it, and
+watched him seal it up, smudging the hot wax with his own great gnarled
+thumb. Then he shouted for the Orakzai Pathan, who came striding in, all
+grins and swagger.
+
+“There--take it! Make speed!” he ordered, and with his rifle at the
+“ready” and the letter tucked inside his shirt, the Pathan favored King
+with a farewell grin and obeyed.
+
+“Get out!” the mullah snarled then immediately. “See to the sick. Tell
+them I sent thee. Bid them be grateful!”
+
+King went. He recognized the almost madness that constituted the
+mullah's driving power. It is contagious, that madness, until it
+destroys itself. It had made several thousand men follow him and believe
+in him, but it had once given Yasmini a chance to fool him and defeat
+him, and now it gave King his chance. He let the mullah think himself
+obeyed implicitly.
+
+He became the busiest man in all the “Hills.” While the mullah glowered
+over the camp from the cave mouth or fulminated from the Quran or fought
+with other mullahs with words for weapons and abuse for argument, he
+bandaged and lanced and poulticed and physicked until his head swam with
+weariness.
+
+The sick swarmed so around him that he had to have a body-guard to keep
+them at bay; so he chose twenty of the least sick from among those who
+had talked with him after sunrise.
+
+And because each of those men had friends, and it is only human to wish
+one's friend in the same boat, especially when the sea, so to speak, is
+rough, the progress through the camp became a current of missionary zeal
+and the virtues of the Anglo-Indian raj were better spoken of than the
+“Hills” had heard for years.
+
+Not that there was any effort made to convert the camp en masse. Far
+from it. But the likely few were pounced on and were told of a chance to
+enlist for a bounty in India. And what with winter not so far ahead, and
+what with experience of former fighting against the British army, the
+choosing was none so difficult. From the day when the lad first feels
+soft down upon his face until the old man's beard turns white and his
+teeth shake out, the Hillman would rather fight than eat; but he prefers
+to fight on the winning side if he may, and he likes good treatment.
+
+Before if was dark that night there were thirty men sworn to hold
+their tongues and to wait for the word to hurry down the Khyber for the
+purpose of enlisting in some British-Indian regiment. Some even began
+to urge the hakim not to wait for the Orakzai Pathan, but to start with
+what he had.
+
+“Shall I leave my brother in the lurch?” the hakim asked them; and
+though they murmured, they thought better of him for it.
+
+Well for him that he had plenty of Epsom salts in his kit, for in the
+“Hills” physic should taste evil and show very quick results to be
+believed in. He found a dozen diseases of which he did not so much as
+know the name, but half of the sufferers swore they were cured after the
+first dose. They would have dubbed him faquir and have foisted him to a
+pillar of holiness had he cared to let them.
+
+Muhammad Anim slept most of the day, like a great animal that scorns to
+live by rule. But at evening he came to the cave mouth and fulminated
+such a sermon as set the whole camp to roaring. He showed his power
+then. The jihad he preached would have tempted dead men from their
+graves to come and share the plunder, and the curses he called down on
+cowards and laggards and unbelievers were enough to have frightened the
+dead away again.
+
+In twenty minutes he had undone all King's missionary work. And then
+in ten more, feeling his power and their response, and being at heart a
+fool as all rogues are, he built it up again.
+
+He began to make promises too definite. He wanted Khinjan Caves. More,
+he needed them. So he promised them they should all be free of Khinjan
+Caves within a day or two, to come and go and live there at their
+pleasure. He promised them they should leave their wives and children
+and belongings safe in the Caves while they themselves went down to
+plunder India. He overlooked the fact that Khinjan Caves for centuries
+had been a secret to be spoken of in whispers, and that prospect of its
+violation came to them as a shock.
+
+Half of them did not believe him. Such a thing was impossible, and if he
+were lying as to one point, why not as to all the others, too?
+
+And the army veterans, who had been converted by King's talk of pardons,
+and almost reconverted by the sermon, shook their heads at the talk of
+taking Khinjan. Why waste time trying to do what never had been done,
+with her to reckon against, when a place in the sun was waiting for them
+down in India, to say nothing of the hope of pardons and clean living
+for a while? They shook their heads and combed their beards and eyed one
+another sidewise in a way the “Hills” understand.
+
+That night, while the mullah glowered over the camp like a great old
+owl, with leaping firelight reflected in his eyes, the thousands under
+the skin tents argued, so that the night was all noise. But King slept.
+
+All of another day and part of another night he toiled among the sick,
+wondering when a message would come back. It was nearly midnight when
+he bandaged his last patient and came out into the starlight to bend his
+back straight and yawn and pick his way reeling with weariness back to
+the mullah's cave. He had given his bag of medicines and implements to
+a man to carry ahead of him and had gone perhaps ten paces into the dark
+when a strong hand gripped him by the wrist.
+
+“Hush!” said a voice that seemed familiar.
+
+He turned swiftly and looked straight into the eyes of the Rangar Rewa
+Gunga!
+
+“How did you get here?” he asked in English.
+
+“Any fool could learn the password into this camp! Come over here,
+sahib. I bring word from her.”
+
+The ground was criss-crossed like a man's palm by the shadows of
+tent-ropes. The Rangar led him to where the tents were forty feet apart
+and none was likely to overhear them. There he turned like a flash.
+
+“She sends you this!” he hissed.
+
+In that same instant King was fighting for his life.
+
+In another second they were down together among the tent-pegs, King
+holding the Rangar's wrist with both hands and struggling to break
+it, and the Rangar striving for another stroke. The dagger he held
+had missed King's ribs by so little that his skin yet tingled from its
+touch. It was a dagger with bronze blade and a gold hilt--her dagger. It
+was her perfume in the air.
+
+They rolled over and over, breathing hard. King wanted to think before
+he gave an alarm, and he could not think with that scent in his nostrils
+and creeping into his lungs. Even in the stress of fighting be wondered
+how the Rangar's clothes and turban had come to be drenched in it. He
+admitted to himself afterward that it was nothing else than jealousy
+that suggested to him to make the Rangar prisoner and hand him over to
+the mullah.
+
+That would have been a ridiculous thing to do, for it would have forced
+his own betrayal to the mullah. But as if the Rangar had read his
+mind he suddenly redoubled his efforts and King, weary to the point of
+sickness, had to redouble his own or die. Perhaps the jealousy helped
+put venom in his effort, for his strength came back to him as a madman's
+does. The Rangar gave a moan and let the knife fall.
+
+And because jealousy is poison King did the wrong thing then. He
+pounced on the knife instead of on the Rangar. He could have questioned
+him--knelt on him and perhaps forced explanations from him. But with a
+sudden swift effort like a snake's the Rangar freed himself and was
+up and gone before King could struggle to his feet--gone like a shadow
+among shadows.
+
+King got up and felt himself all over, for they had fought on stony
+ground and he was bruised. But bruises faded into nothing, and weariness
+as well, as his mind began to dwell on the new complication to his
+problem.
+
+It was plain that the moment he had returned from his message to the
+Khyber the Rangar had been sent on this new murderous mission. If
+Yasmini had told the truth a letter had gone into India describing him,
+King, as a traitor, and from her point of view that might be supposed to
+cut the very ground away from under his feet.
+
+Then why so much trouble to have him killed? Either Rewa Gunga had never
+taken the first letter, or--and this seemed more probable--Yashiini had
+never believed the letter would be treated seriously by the authorities,
+and had only sent it in the hope of fooling him and undermining his
+determination. In that case, especially supposing her to have received
+his ultimatum on the mullah's behalf before sending Rewa Gunga with the
+dagger, she must consider him at least dangerous. Could she be afraid?
+If so her game was lost already!
+
+Perhaps she saw her own peril. Perhaps she contemplated--gosh! what a
+contingency!--perhaps she contemplated bolting into India with a story
+of her own, and leaving the mullah to his own devices! In such a case,
+before going she would very likely try to have the one man stabbed who
+could give her away most completely. In fact, would she dare escape into
+India and leave himself alive behind her?
+
+He rather thought she would dare do anything. And that thought brought
+reassurance. She would dare, and being what she was she almost surely
+would seek vengeance on the mullah before doing anything else.
+
+Then why the dagger for himself? She must believe him in league with the
+mullah against her. She might believe that with him out of the way the
+mullah would prove an easier prey for her. And that belief might be
+justifiable, but as an explanation it failed to satisfy.
+
+There was an alternative, the very thought of which made him fearfully
+uneasy, and yet brought a thrill with it. In all eastern lands, love
+scorned takes to the dagger. He had half believed her when she swore she
+loved him! The man who could imagine himself loved by Yasmini and not be
+thrilled to his core would be inhuman, whatever reason and caution and
+caste and creed might whisper in imagination's wake.
+
+Reeling from fatigue (he felt like a man who had been racked, for the
+Rangar's strength was nearly unbelievable), he started toward where the
+mullah sat glowering in the cave mouth. He found the man who had carried
+his bag asleep at the foot of the ramp, and taking the bag away from
+him, let him lie there. And it took him five minutes to drag his hurt
+weary bones up the ramp, for the fight had taken more out of him than he
+had guessed at first.
+
+The mullah glared at him but let him by without a word. It was by the
+fire at the back of the cave, where he stooped to dip water from the
+mullah's enormous crock that the next disturbing factor came to light.
+He kicked a brand into the fire and the flame leaped. Its light shone
+on a yard and a half of exquisitely fine hair, like spun gold, that
+caressed his shoulder and descended down one arm. One thread of hair
+that conjured up a million thoughts, and in a second upset every
+argument!
+
+If Rewa Gunga had been near enough to her and intimate enough with her
+not only to become scented with her unmistakable perfume but even to get
+her hair on his person, then gone was all imagination of her love for
+himself! Then she had lied from first to last! Then she had tried to
+make him love her that she might use him, and finding she had failed,
+she had sent her true love with the dagger to make an end!
+
+In a moment he imagined a whole picture, as it might have been in a
+crystal, of himself trapped and made to don the Roman's armor and forced
+to pose to the savage 'Hills'--or fooled into posing to them--as her
+lover, while Rewa Gunga lurked behind the scenes and waited for the
+harvest in the end. And what kind of harvest?
+
+And what kind of man must Rewa Gunga be who could lightly let go all
+the prejudices of the East and submit to what only the West has endured
+hitherto with any complacency--a “tertium quid”?
+
+Yet what a fool he, King, had been not to appreciate at once that Rewa
+Gunga must be her lover. Why should he not be? Were they not alike as
+cousins? And the East does not love its contrary, but its complement,
+being older in love than the West, and wiser in its ways in all but the
+material. He had been blind. He had overlooked the obvious--that from
+first to last her plan had been to set herself and this Rewa Gunga on
+the throne of India!
+
+He washed and went through the mummery of muslim prayers for the
+watchful mullah's sake, and climbed on to his bed. But sleep seemed out
+of the question. He lay and tossed for an hour, his mind as busy as a
+terrier in hay. And when he did fall asleep at last it was so to
+dream and mutter that the mullah came and shook him and preached him
+a half-hour sermon against the mortal sins that rob men of peaceful
+slumber by giving them a foretaste of the hell to come.
+
+All that seemed kinder and more refreshing than King's own thoughts had
+been, for when the mullah had done at last and had gone striding back to
+the cave mouth, he really did fall sound asleep, and it was after dawn
+when he awoke. The mullah's voice, not untuneful was rousing all the
+valley echoes in the call to prayer.
+
+        Allah is Almighty!  Allah is Almighty!
+        I declare there is no God but Allah!
+        I declare Muhammad is his prophet!
+        Hie ye to prayer!
+        Hie ye to salvation!
+        Prayer is better than sleep!
+        Prayer is better than sleep!
+        There is no God but Allah!
+
+And while King knelt behind the mullah and the whole camp faced Mecca in
+forehead-in-the-dust abasement there came a strange procession down the
+midst--not strange to the “Hills,” where such sights are common, but
+strange to that camp and hour. Somebody rose and struck them, and they
+knelt like the rest; but when prayer was over and cooking had begun and
+the camp became a place of savory smell, they came on again--seven blind
+men.
+
+They were weary, ragged, lean--seven very tatter-demalions--and the
+front man led them, tapping the ground with a long stick. The others
+clung to him in line, one behind the other. He was the only clean-shaven
+one, and he was the tallest. He looked as if he had not been blind so
+long, for his physical health was better. All seven men yelled at the
+utmost of their lungs, but he yelled the loudest.
+
+“Oh, the hakim--the good hakim!” they wailed. “Where is the famous
+hakim? We be blind men--blind we be--blind--blind! Oh, pity us! Is any
+kismet worse than ours? Oh, show us to the hakim! Show us the way to
+him! Lead us to him! Oh, the famous, great, good hakim who can heal
+men's eyes!”
+
+The mullah looked down on them like a vulture waiting to see them die,
+and seeing they did not die, turned his back and went into his cave.
+Close to the ramp they stopped, and the front man, cocking his head to
+one side as only birds and the newly blind do, gave voice again in nasal
+singsong.
+
+“Will none tell me where is the great, good, wise hakim Kurram Khan?”
+
+“I am he,” said King, and he stepped down toward him, calling to an
+assistant to come and bring him water and a sponge. The blind man's face
+looked strangely familiar, though it was partly disguised by some gummy
+stuff stuck all about the eyes. Taking it in both hands be tilted the
+eyes to the light and opened one eye with his thumb. There was nothing
+whatever the matter with it. He opened the other.
+
+“Rub me an ointment on!” the man urged him, and he stared at the face
+again.
+
+“Ismail!” he said. “You?”
+
+“Aye! Father of cleverness! Make play of healing my eyes!”
+
+So King dipped a sponge in water and sent back for his bag and made a
+great show of rubbing on ointment. In a minute Ismail, looking almost
+like a young man without his great beard, was dancing like a lunatic
+with both fists in the air, and yelling as if wasps had stung him.
+
+“Aieee--aieee--aieee!” he yelled. “I see again! I see! My eyes have
+light in them! Allah! Oh, Allah heap riches on the great wise hakfim who
+can heal men's eyes! Allah reward him richly, for I am a beggar and have
+no goods!”
+
+The other six blind men came struggling to be next, and while King
+rubbed ointment on their eyes and saw that there was nothing there he
+could cure the whole camp began to surge toward him to see the miracle,
+and his chosen body-guard rushed up to drive them back.
+
+“Find your way down the Khyber and ask for the Wilayti dakitar. He will
+finish the cure.”
+
+The six blind men, half-resentful, half-believing, turned away, mainly
+because Ismail drove them with words and blows. And as they went a tall
+Afridi came striding down the camp with a letter for the mullah held out
+in a cleft stick in front of him.
+
+“Her answer!” said Ismail with a wicked grin.
+
+“What is her word? Where is the Orakzai Pathan?”
+
+But Ismail laughed and would not answer him. It seemed to King that he
+scented climax. So did his near-fifty and their thirty friends. He chose
+to take the arrival of the blind men as a hint from Providence and to
+“go it blind” on the strength of what he had hoped might happen. Also he
+chose in that instant to force the mullah's hand, on the principle that
+hurried buffaloes will blunder.
+
+“To Khinjan!” he shouted to the nearest man. “The mullah will march on
+Khinjan!”
+
+They murmured and wondered and backed away from him to give him room.
+Ismail watched him with dropped jaw and wild eye.
+
+“Spread it through the camp that we march on Khinjan! Shout it! Bid them
+strike the tents!”
+
+Somebody behind took up the shout and it went across the camp in leaps,
+as men toss a ball. There was a surge toward the tents, but King called
+to his deserters and they clustered back to him. He had to cement their
+allegiance now or fail altogether, and he would not be able to do it by
+ordinary argument or by pleading; he had to fire their imagination. And
+he did.
+
+“She is on our side!” That was a sheer guess. “She has kept our man and
+sent another as hostage for him in token of good faith! Listen! Ye saw
+this man's eyes healed. Let that be a token! Be ye the men with new
+eyes! Give it out! Claim the title and be true to it and see me guide
+you down the Khyber in good time like a regiment, many more than a
+hundred strong!”
+
+They jumped at the idea. The “Hills”--the whole East, for that
+matter--are ever ready to form a new sect or join a new band or a
+new blood-feud. Witness the Nikalseyns, who worship a long-since dead
+Englishman.
+
+“We see!” yelled one of them.
+
+“We see!” they chorused, and the idea took charge. From that minute they
+were a new band, with a war-cry of their own.
+
+“To Khinjan!” they howled, scattering through the camp, and the mullah
+came out to glare at them and tug his beard and wonder what possessed
+them.
+
+“To Khinjan!” they roared at him. “Lead us to Khinjan!”
+
+“To Khinjan, then!” he thundered, throwing up both arms in a sort of
+double apostolic blessing, and then motioning as if he threw them the
+reins and leave to gallop. They roared back at him like the sea under
+the whip of a gaining wind. And Ismail disappeared among them, leaving
+King alone. Then the mullah's eyes fell on King and he beckoned him.
+
+King went up with an effort, for he ached yet from his struggle of the
+night before. Up there by the ashes of the fire the mullah showed him a
+letter he had crumpled in his fist. There were only a few lines, written
+in Arabic, which all mullahs are supposed to be able to read, and they
+were signed with a strange scrawl that might have meant anything. But
+the paper smelt strongly of her perfume.
+
+“Come, then. Bring all your men, and I will let you and them enter
+Khinjan Caves. We will strike a bargain in the Cavern of Earth's Drink.”
+
+That was all, but the fire in the mullah's eyes showed that he thought
+it was enough. He did not doubt that once he should have his extra four
+thousand in the caves Khinjan would be his; and he said so.
+
+“Khinjan is mine!” he growled. “India is mine!”
+
+And King did not answer him. He did not believe Yasmini would be fool
+enough to trust herself in any bargain with Muhammad Anim. Yet he could
+see no alternative as yet. He could only be still and be glad he had set
+the camp moving and so had forced the mullah's hand.
+
+“The old fatalist would have suspected her answer otherwise!” he told
+himself, for he knew that he himself suspected it.
+
+While he and the mullah watched the tents began to fall and the women
+labored to roll them. The men began firing their rifles, and within the
+hour enough ammunition had been squandered to have fought a good-sized
+skirmish; but the mullah did not mind, for he had Khinjan Caves in view,
+and none knew better than he what vast store of cartridges and dynamite
+was piled in there. He let them waste.
+
+Watching his opportunity, King slipped down the ramp and into the crowd,
+while the mullah was busy with personal belongings in the cave. King
+left his own belongings to the fates, or to any thief who should care
+to steal them. He was safe from the mullah in the midst of his nearly
+eighty men, who half believed him a sending from the skies.
+
+“We see! we see!” they yelled and danced around him.
+
+Before ever the mullah gave an order they got under way and started
+climbing the steep valley wall. The mullah on his brown mule thrust
+forward, trying to get in the lead, and King and his men hung back, to
+keep at a distance from him. It was when the mullah had reached the top
+of the slope and was not far from being in the lead that Ismail appeared
+again, leading King's horse, that he had found in possession of another
+man. That did not look like enmity or treachery. King mounted and
+thanked him. Ismail wiped his knife, that had blood on it, and stuck
+his tongue through his teeth, which did not look quite like treachery
+either. Yet the Afridi could not be got to say a word.
+
+Two or three miles along the top of the escarpment the mullah sent back
+word that he wanted the hakim to be beside him. Doubtless he had looked
+back and had seen King on the horse, head and shoulders above the
+baggage.
+
+But King's men treated the messenger to open scorn and sent him packing.
+
+“Bid the mullah hunt himself another hakim! Be thou his hakim! Stay, we
+will give thee a lesson in how to use a knife!”
+
+The man ran, lest they carry out their threat, for men joke grimly in
+the “Hills.”
+
+Ismail came and held King's stirrup, striding beside him with the easy
+Hillman gait.
+
+“Art thou my man at last?” King asked him, but Ismail laughed and shook
+his head.
+
+“I am her man.”
+
+“Where is she?” King asked.
+
+“Nay, who am I that I should know?”
+
+“But she sent thee?”
+
+“Aye, she sent me.”
+
+“To what purpose?”'
+
+“To her purpose!” the Afridi answered, and King could not get another
+word out of him. He fell behind.
+
+But out of the corner of his eye, and once or twice by looking back
+deliberately, King saw that Ismail was taking the members of his new
+band one by one and whispering to them. What he said was a mystery, but
+as they talked each man looked at King. And the more they talked the
+better pleased they seemed. And as the day wore on the more deferential
+they grew. By midday if King wanted to dismount there were three at
+least to hold his stirrup and ten to help him mount again.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVIII
+
+
+
+     By the sweat of your brow;  by the ache of your bones;
+     In the sun, in the wind, in the chill of the rains,
+     Ye sowed as ye knew.  And ye know it was blown
+     To be trodden and burned--aye, and that by your own
+     Who sneered at lean furrows and mocked at the stones.
+     But ye stayed and sowed on.  And a little remains.
+     Ye shall have for your faith.  Ye shall reap for your pains.
+
+
+Four thousand men with women and children and baggage do not move
+so swiftly as one man or a dozen, especially in the “Hills,” where
+discipline is reckoned beneath a proud man's honor. There were many
+miles to go before Khinjan when night fell and the mullah bade them
+camp. He bade them camp because they would have done it otherwise in any
+case.
+
+“And we,” said King to his all but eighty who crowded around him, “being
+men with new eyes and with a great new hope in us, will halt here and
+eat the evening meal and watch for an opportunity.”
+
+“Opportunity for what?” they asked him.
+
+“An opportunity to show how Allah loves the brave!” said King, and they
+had to be content with that, for he would say no more to them. Seeing he
+would not talk, they made their little fires all around him and watched
+while their women cooked the food. The mullah would not let them eat
+until he and the whole camp had prayed like the only righteous.
+
+When the evening meal was eaten, and sentries had been set at every
+vantage point, and the men all sat about cleansing their beards and
+fingers the mullah sent for the hakim again. Only this time he sent
+twenty men to fetch him.
+
+There was so nearly a fight that the skin all down King's back was
+gooseflesh, for a fight at that juncture would have ruined everything.
+At the least he would have been made a hopeless helpless prisoner. But
+in the end the mullah's men drew off snarling, and before they could
+have time to receive new orders or reinforcements, King's die was cast.
+
+There came another order from the mullah. The women and children were to
+be left in camp next dawn, and to remain there until sent for. There
+was murmuring at that around the camp, and especially among King's
+contingent. But King laughed.
+
+“It is good!” he said.
+
+“Why? How so?” they asked him.
+
+“Bid your women make for the Khyber soon after the mullah marches
+tomorrow. Bid them travel down the Khyber until we and they meet!”
+
+“But--”
+
+“Please yourselves, sahibs!” The hakim's air was one of supremest
+indifference. “As for me, I leave no women behind me in the mountains. I
+am content.”
+
+They murmured a while, but they gave the orders to their women, and
+King watched the women nod. And all that while Ismail watched him
+with carefully disguised concern, but undisguised interest. And King
+understood. Enlightenment comes to a man swiftly, when it does come, as
+a rule.
+
+He recalled that Yasmini had not done much to make his first entry into
+Khinjan easy. On the contrary, she had put him on his mettle and had set
+Rewa Gunga to the task of frightening him and had tested him and tried
+him before tempting him at last.
+
+She must be watching him now, for even the East repeats itself. She had
+sent Ismail for that purpose. It might be Ismail's business to drive a
+knife in him at the first opportunity, but he doubted that. It was much
+more likely that, having failed in an attempt to have him murdered, she
+was superstitiously remorseful. Her course would depend on his. If he
+failed, she was done with him. If he succeeded in establishing a strong
+position of his own, she would yield.
+
+All of which did not explain Ismail's whisperings and noddings and chin
+strokings with King's contingent. But it explained enough for King's
+present purpose, and he wasted no time on riders to the problem. With
+or without Ismail's aid, with or without his enmity, he must control his
+eighty men and give the slip to the mullah, and he went at once about
+the best way to do both.
+
+“We will go now,” he said quietly. “That sentry in yonder shadow has his
+back turned. He has over-eaten. We will rush him and put good running
+between us and the mullah.”
+
+Surprised into obedience, and too delighted at the prospect of action to
+wonder why they should obey a hakim so, they slung on their bandoliers
+and made ready. Ismail brought up King's horse and he mounted. And then
+at King's word all eighty made a sudden swoop on the drowsy sentry
+and took him unawares. They tossed him over the cliff, too startled
+to scream an alarm; and though sentries on either hand heard them and
+shouted, they were gone into outer darkness like wind-blown ghosts of
+dead men before the mullah even knew what was happening.
+
+They did not halt until not one of them could run another yard, King
+trusting to his horse to find a footing along the cliff-tops, and to the
+men to find the way.
+
+“Whither?” one whispered to him.
+
+“To Khinjan!” he answered; and that was enough. Each whispered to the
+other, and they all became fired with curiosity more potent than money
+bribes.
+
+When he halted at last and dismounted and sat down and the stragglers
+caught up, panting, they held a council of war all together, with Ismail
+sitting at King's back and leaning a chin on his shoulder in order to
+hear better. Bone pressed on bone, and the place grew numb; King shook
+him off a dozen times; but each time Ismail set his chin back on the
+same spot, as a dog will that listens to his master. Yet he insisted he
+was her man, and not King's.
+
+“Now, ye men of the Hills,” said King, “listen to me who am
+political-offender-with-reward-for-capture-offered!” That was a gem of a
+title. It fired their imaginations. “I know things that no soldier would
+find out in a thousand years, and I will tell you some of what I know.”
+
+Now he had to be careful. If he were to invent too much they might
+denounce him as a traitor to the “Hills” in general. If he were to tell
+them too little they would lose interest and might very well desert
+him at the first pinch. He must feel for the middle way and upset no
+prejudices.
+
+“She has discovered that this mullah Muhammad Anim is no true muslim,
+but an unbelieving dog of a foreigner from Farangistan! She has
+discovered that he plans to make himself an emperor in these Hills, and
+to sell Hillmen into slavery!” Might as well serve the mullah up hot
+while about it! Beyond any doubt not much more than a mile away the
+mullah was getting even by condemning the lot of them to death. “An eye
+for the risk of an eye!” say the unforgiving Hills.
+
+“If one of us should go back into his camp now he would be tortured. Be
+sure of that.”
+
+Breathing deeply in the darkness, they nodded, as if the dark had eyes.
+Ismail's chin drove a fraction deeper into his shoulder.
+
+“Now ye know--for all men know--that the entrance into Khinjan Caves is
+free to any man who can tell a lie without flinching. It is the way out
+again that is not free. How many men do ye know that have entered and
+never returned?”
+
+They all nodded again. It was common knowledge that Khinjan was a very
+graveyard of the presumptuous.
+
+“She has set a trap for the mullah. She will let him and all his men
+enter and will never let them out again!”
+
+“How knowest thou?” This from two men, one on either hand.
+
+“Was I never in Khinjan Caves?” he retorted. “Whence came I? I am her
+man, sent to help trap the mullah! I would have trapped all you, but
+for being weary of these 'Hills' and wishful to go back to India and be
+pardoned! That is who I am! That is how I know!”
+
+Their breath came and went sibilantly, and the darkness was alive with
+the excitement they thought themselves too warrior-like to utter.
+
+“But what will she do then?” asked somebody.
+
+King searched his memory, and in a moment there came back to him a
+picture of the hurrying jezailchi he had held up in the Khyber Pass,
+and recollection of the man's words.
+
+“Know ye not,” he said, “that long ago she gave leave to all who ate
+the salt to be true to the salt? She gave the Khyber jezailchis leave to
+fight against her. Be sure, whatever she does, she will stand between no
+man and his pardon!”
+
+“But will she lead a jihad? We will not fight against her!”
+
+“Nay,” said King, drawing his breath in. Ismail's chin felt like a knife
+against his collar bone, and Ismail's iron fingers clutched his arm.
+It was time to give his hostage to dame Fortune. “She will go down into
+India and use her influence in the matter of the pardons!”
+
+“I believe thou art a very great liar indeed!” said the man who lacked
+part of his nose. “The Pathan went, and he did not come back. What proof
+have we.”
+
+“Ye have me!” said King. “If I show you no proof, how can I escape you?”
+
+They all grunted agreement as to that. King used his elbow to hit Ismail
+in the ribs. He did not dare speak to him; but now was the time for
+Ismail to carry information to her, supposing that to be his job. And
+after a minute Ismail rolled into a shadow and was gone. King gave him
+twenty minutes start, letting his men rest their legs and exercise their
+tongues.
+
+Now that he was out of the mullah's clutches--and he suspected Yasmini
+would know of it within an hour or two, and before dawn in any event--he
+began to feel like a player in a game of chess who foresees his opponent
+mate in so many moves.
+
+If Yasmini were to let the mullah and his men into the Caves and to join
+forces with him in there, he would at least have time to hurry back to
+India with his eighty men and give warning. He might have time to call
+up the Khyber jezailchis and blockade the Caves before the hive could
+swarm, and he chuckled to think of the hope of that.
+
+On the other hand, if there was to be a battle royal between Yasmini and
+the mullah he would be there to watch it and to comfort India with the
+news.
+
+“Now we will go on again, in order to be close to Khinjan at break of
+day,” he said, and they all got up and obeyed him as if his word had
+been law to them for years. Of all of them he was the only man in
+doubt--he who seemed most confident of all.
+
+They swung along into the darkness under low-hung stars, trailing behind
+King's horse, with only half a dozen of them a hundred yards or so ahead
+as an advance guard, and all of them expecting to see Khinjan loom
+above each next valley, for distances and darkness are deceptive in the
+“Hills,” even to trained eyes. Suddenly the advance guard halted, but
+did not shoot. And as King caught up with them he saw they were talking
+with some one.
+
+He had to ride up close before he recognized the Orakzai Pathan.
+
+“Salaam!” said the fellow with a grin. “I bring one hundred and eleven!”
+
+As he spoke graveyard shadows rose out of the darkness all around and
+leaned on rifles.
+
+“Be ye men all ex-soldiers of the raj?” King asked them.
+
+“Aye!” they growled in chorus.
+
+“What will ye?”
+
+“Pardons!” They all said the word together.
+
+“Who gave you leave to come?” King asked.
+
+“None! He told us of the pardons and we came!”
+
+“Aye!” said the Orakzai Pathan, drawing King aside. “But she gave me
+leave to seek them out and tempt them!”
+
+“And what does she intend?” King asked him suddenly.
+
+“She? Ask Allah, who put the spirit in her! How should I know?”
+
+“We will march again, my brothers!” King shouted, and they streamed
+along behind him, now with no advance guard, but with the Orakzai Pathan
+striding beside King's horse, with a great hand on the saddle. Like the
+others, he seemed decided in his mind that the hakim ought not to be
+allowed much chance to escape.
+
+Just as the dawn was tinting the surrounding peaks with softest rose
+they topped a ridge, and Khinjan lay below them across the mile-wide
+bone-dry valley. They all stood and stared at it, leaning on their guns.
+All the “Men with New Eyes” saw it now for the first time, and it held
+them speechless, for with its patchwork towers and high battlements it
+looked like a very city of the spirits that their tales around the fire
+on winter nights so linger on.
+
+And while they watched, and the Khinjan men were beginning to murmur
+(for they needed no last view of the place to satisfy any longings!)
+none else than Ismail rose from behind a rock and came to King's
+stirrup. He tugged and King backed his horse until they stood together
+apart.
+
+“She sends this message,” said Ismail, showing his teeth in the most
+peculiar grin that surely the Hills ever witnessed. And then, omitting
+the message, he proceeded first to give some news. “Many of her men who
+have never been in the army, are none the less true to her, and she will
+not leave them to the mullah's mercy. They will leave the Caves in a
+little while and will come up here. They are to go down into India and
+be made prisoners if the sirkar will not enlist them. You are to wait
+for them here.”
+
+“Is that all her message?” King asked him.
+
+“Nay. That is none of it! This is her message. THOU SHALT KNOW THIS DAY,
+THOU ENGLISHMAN, WHETHER OR NOT SHE TRULY LOVED THEE! THERE SHALL BE
+PROOF, SUCH AS EVEN THOU SHALT UNDERSTAND!”'
+
+“What does that mean?”
+
+“Nay, who am I that I should know?”
+
+Ismail slipped away and lost himself among the men, and none of them
+seemed to notice that he had been away and had come again. On King's
+advice a dozen men climbed near-by eminences and began to watch for the
+mullah's coming. The Khinjan men murmured openly; they wanted to be off.
+
+“But no,” said King. “Go if ye will, but she has sent word that other
+men are coming. I wait for them here.”
+
+After a great deal of resentful argument they consented to lie hidden
+for an hour or two “but no longer,” and King hid his horse in a hollow
+and persuaded three of them to gather grass for him. It was a little
+more than an hour after dawn and the chilled rocks were beginning to
+grow warmer when the head of a procession came out of Khinjan Gate and
+started toward them over the valley. In all more than five hundred men
+emerged and about a hundred women and children, and King's men were
+kept busy for half an hour counting them and quarreling about the
+exact number. Some of them were burdened heavily, and there was much
+discussion as to whether to loot them or not. Then:
+
+“Muhammad Anim comes!” shouted a voice from a crag top.
+
+They snuggled into better hiding, and there was no thought now of
+leaving before the mullah should go by. There began to be wagers as to
+whether her men would be hidden out of sight before the mullah could top
+the rise; and then, when the last man was safe across the valley and up
+the cliff and in hiding, there was endless argument as to how much each
+had betted and to whom he had lost. It needed an effort to quiet them
+when the mullah rose into view at last above the rise and paused for a
+minute to stare across at Khinjan before leading his four thousand down
+and onward. He was silent as an image, but his men roared like a river
+in flood and he made no effort to check them. He was like a man who has
+made up his mind to victory in any event. He seemed to be speculating
+three or four moves ahead of this one, and to hold this one such a
+foregone conclusion in his mind that it had ceased to interest. He was
+admirable, there was no doubt of that. In his own way, like an old
+boar sniffing up the wind for trouble, he could command a decent man's
+respect.
+
+He dismounted, for he had to, and tossed his reins to the nearest
+man with the air of an emperor. And he led the way dawn the cliffside
+without hesitation, striding like a mountaineer. His men followed him
+noisily, holding hands to make human chains at the difficult places
+and shouting a great deal; but not quite naturally now. They were too
+impressed by the seriousness of what they undertook, and in their hearts
+too much afraid. The noise was bravado.
+
+It was a weary long wait, watching from the crevices until the last
+man's back departed down the cliff, and the procession--Pied Piper of
+Hamelin and rats, (but no music!)--wound across the valley. At last
+Khinjan Gate opened and the mullah led in. The gate did not shut after
+the last man, King noted that.
+
+“Let us go now!” shouted fifty voices, and every man of King's party
+showed himself and stretched. “Let us go! Why wait?”
+
+But King would not go. Nor would he explain why he would not go. Nor
+could he tell himself what held him, gazing at Khinjan, except that he
+thought of Yasmini and ached to know what she was doing.
+
+It was thirty minutes after the last of the mullahs men had vanished
+through the gate, and his own men in dozens and twenties were scattered
+along the cliff-top arguing against delay with growing rancor, when
+a lone horseman galloped out of Khinjan Gate and started across the
+valley. He rode recklessly. He was either panic-stricken or else bolder
+than the devil.
+
+In a minute King had recognized the mare, and so had the eyes of fifty
+men around him. No man with half an eye for a horse could have failed
+to recognize that black mare, having ever seen her once. She came like
+a goat among the rocks, just as she had once dived into darkness in the
+Khyber with King following. In another two minutes King had recognized
+the Rangar's silken turban. And now there was no need to restrain the
+men; they all stood and watched, to know what new turn affairs were
+taking.
+
+Most of them were staring downward at the Rangar's head as he urged the
+mare up the cliff path, when the explanation of Yasmini's message came.
+It was only King, urged by some intuition, who had his eyes fixed on
+Khinjan.
+
+There came a shock that actually swayed the hill they stood on. The mare
+on the path below missed her footing and fell a dozen feet, only to
+get up again and scramble as if a thousand devils were behind her, the
+Rangar riding her grimly, like a jockey in a race. Three more shocks
+followed. A great slice of Khinjan suddenly caved in with a roar, and
+smoke and dust burst upward through the tumbling crust.
+
+There was a pause after that, as if the waiting elements were gathering
+strength. For ten minutes they watched and scarcely breathed. Rewa Gunga
+gained the summit and, dismounting, stood by King with the reins over
+his arm. The mare was too blown to do anything but stand and tremble.
+And King was too enthralled to do anything but stare.
+
+“That is what a woman can do for a man!” said Rewa Gunga grimly. “She
+set a fuse and exploded all the dynamite. There were tons of it! The
+galleries must have fallen in, one on the other! A thousand men digging
+for a thousand years could never get into Khinjan now, and the only way
+out is down Earth's Drink! She bade me come and bid you good-by, sahib.
+I would have stayed in there, but she commanded me. She said, 'Tell King
+sahib my love was true. Tell him I give him India and all Asia that were
+at my mercy!'”
+
+While the Rangar spoke there came three more earth tremors in swift
+succession, and a thunder out of Khinjan as if the very “Hills” were
+coming to an end. The mare grew frantic and the Rangar summoned six men
+to hold her.
+
+Suddenly, right over the top of Khinjan's upper rim, where only the
+eagles ever perched, there burst a column of water, immeasurable, huge,
+that for a moment blotted out the sun. It rose sheer upward, curved on
+itself, and fell in a million-ton deluge on to Khinjan and into Khinjan
+valley, hissing and roaring and thundering.
+
+Earth's Drink had been blocked by the explosion and had found a new
+way over the barrier before plunging down again into the bowels of
+the world. The one sky-flung leap it made as its weight burst down a
+mountain wall was enough to blot out Khinjan forever, and what had been
+a dry mile-wide moat was a shallow lake with death's rack and rubbish
+floating on the surface.
+
+The earth rocked. The Hillmen prayed, and King stared, trying to
+memorize all that had been. Suddenly it flashed across his mind that the
+Rangar who had striven like a fiend to stab him only a matter of hours
+ago was now standing behind him, within a yard.
+
+He was up on his feet in a second and faced about. The Rangar laughed.
+
+“So ends the 'Heart of the Hills!'” he said. “Think kindly of her,
+sahib. She thought well enough of you!”
+
+He laughed again and sprang on the black mare, and before King could
+speak or raise a hand to stop him he was off, hell-bent-for-leather
+along the precipice in the direction of the Khyber Pass and India. Two
+of the men who had come out of Khinjan mounted and spurred after him.
+
+King collected his men and the women and children. It was easy, for they
+were numb from what they had witnessed and dazed by fear. In half an
+hour he had them mustered and marching.
+
+“Let us go back and loot the mullah's camp and take the women!” urged a
+dozen men at least.
+
+“Go then!” said King. “Go back! But I go on!”
+
+“He is afraid! The hakim is afraid of what he saw!”
+
+King let them think so. He let them think anything they chose, knowing
+well that what had unnerved him had at least rendered them amenable to
+leading. They would have no more dared go back without him, and without
+at least a hundred others, than they would have dared go and hunt in the
+ruins of Khinjan.
+
+Even Ismail clang to his stirrup and would not leave him, looking like
+a fledgling with his beard all new-sprouted on his jaw, and eyes wider
+than any bird's.
+
+“Why art thou here?” King asked him. “Had she no true men who would die
+with her?”
+
+The Afridi scowled, but choked the answer back.
+
+“Art thou my man now?” King asked him. But he shook his head.
+
+So they marched without talking over the hideous boulder-strewn range
+that separates Khinjan from the Khyber, sleeping fitfully whenever King
+called a halt, and eating almost nothing at all, for only a few of them
+had thought of bringing food.
+
+They reached the Khyber famished and were fed at Ali Masjid Fort, after
+King had given a certain password and had whispered to the officer
+commanding. But he did not change into European clothes yet, and none of
+his following suspected him of being an Englishman.
+
+“A Rangar on a black mare has gone down the pass ahead of you in a
+hurry,” they told him at Ali Masjid. “He had two men with him and food
+enough. Only stopped long enough to make his business known.”
+
+“What did he say his business is?” asked King.
+
+“He gave a sign and said a word that satisfied us--on that point!”
+
+“Oh!” said King. “Can you signal down the Pass?”
+
+“Surely.”
+
+“Courtenay still at Jamrud?”
+
+“Yes. In charge there and growing tired of doing nothing.”
+
+“Signal down and ask him to have that bath ready for me that I spoke
+about. Good-by.”
+
+So he left Ali Masjid at the head of a motley procession that grew
+noisier and more confident every hour. Ismail still clung to his
+stirrup, but began to grow more lively and to have a good many orders to
+fling to the rest.
+
+“You mourn like a dog,” King told him. “Three howls and a whine and a
+little sulking--and then forgetfulness!”
+
+Ismail looked nasty at that but did not answer, although he seemed to
+have a hot word ready. And thenceforward he hung his head more, and at
+least tried to seem bereaved. But his manner was unconvincing none the
+less, and King found it food for thought.
+
+The ex-soldiers and would-be soldiers marched in fours behind him,
+growing hourly more like drilled men, and talking, with each stride that
+brought them nearer India, more as men do who have an interest in law
+and order. Behind them tramped the women from Khinjan, carrying their
+babies and their husbands loads; and behind them again were the other
+women, who had been told they would be overtaken in the Khyber, but who
+had actually had to run themselves raw-footed in order to catch up.
+
+Down the Khyber have come conquerors, a dozen conquering kings, and as
+many beaten armies; but surely no stranger host than this ever trudged
+between the echoing walls. The very eagles screamed at them.
+
+And as they neared Jamrud Fort the men who sought pardons began to grow
+sheepish. They began to remember that the hakim might after all be a
+trickster, and to realize how much too friendly--how almost intimate he
+had been with the sahibs at Ali Masjid. They began to cluster round
+him instead of letting him lead, and by the time they met the farthest
+outposts up the Khyber they were as nervous as raw recruits and ready to
+turn and bolt at a word--for no one can be more timid than your Hillman
+when he is not sure of himself, just as no one can be braver when he
+knows his ground.
+
+Signals preceded them, and Courtenay himself rode up the Pass to greet
+them. But of course he was not very cordial to King, considering his
+disguise; and he chose to keep the Hillmen in doubt yet as to their
+eventual reception. But one of them, the Orakzai Pathan (for nothing
+could completely unman him), shouted to know whether it was true that
+pardons had been offered for deserters, and Courtenay nodded. They were
+less timid after that. Some of them pulled medals out and pinned them
+outside their shirts.
+
+At Jamrud they were given food and their rifles were taken away from
+them and a guard was set to watch them. But the guard only consisted
+of two men, both of whom were Pathans, and they assured them that,
+ridiculous though it sounded, the British were actually willing to
+forgive their enemies and to pardon all deserters who applied for pardon
+on condition of good faith in the future.
+
+That night they prayed to Allah like little children lost and found. The
+women crooned love-songs to their babies over the clear fires and the
+men talked--and talked--and talked until the stars grew big as moons to
+weary eyes and they slept at last, to dream of khaki uniforms and karnel
+sahibs who knew neither fear nor favor and who said things that were so.
+It is a mad world to the Himalayan Hillman where men in authority tell
+truth unadorned without shame and without consideration--a mad, mad
+world, and perhaps too exotic to be wholesome, but pleasant while the
+dream lasts.
+
+Over in the fort Courtenay placed a bath at King's disposal and lent him
+clean clothes and a razor. But he was not very cordial.
+
+“Tell me all the war news!” said King, splashing in the tub. And
+Courtenay told him, passing him another cake of soap when the first
+was finished. After all there was not much to tell--butchery in
+Belgium--Huns and guns--and the everlastingly glorious stand that saved
+Paris and France and Europe.
+
+“According to the cables our men are going the records one better. I
+think that's all,” said Courtenay.
+
+“Then why the stuffiness?” asked King. “Why am I talked to at the end of
+a tube, so to speak?”
+
+“You're under arrest!” said Courtenay.
+
+“The deuce I am!”
+
+“I'm taking care of you myself to obviate the necessity of putting a
+sentry on guard over you.”
+
+“Good of you, I'm sure. What's it all about?”
+
+“I don't mind telling you, but I'd rather you'd wait. The minute you
+were sighted word was wired down to headquarters, and the general
+himself will be up here by train any minute.”
+
+“Very well,” said King. “Got a cigar? Got a black one? Blacker the
+better!”
+
+He was out of his bath and remembered that minute that he had not smoked
+a cigar since leaving India. Naked, shaved, with some of the stain
+removed, he did not look like a man in trouble as he filled his lungs
+with the saltpeterish smoke of a fat Trichinopoli.
+
+And then the general came and did not wait for King to get dressed but
+burst into the bathroom and shook hands with him while he was still
+naked and asked ten questions (like a gatling gun) while King was
+getting on his trousers, divining each answer after the third word and
+waving the rest aside.
+
+“And why am I arrested, sir?” asked King the moment he could slip the
+question in edgewise.
+
+“Oh, yes, of course. Try the case here as well as anywhere. What does
+this mean?”
+
+Out of his pocket the general produced a letter that smelt strongly of
+a scent King recognized. He spread it out on a table, and King read. It
+was Yasmini's letter that she had sent down the Khyber to make India too
+hot to hold him.
+
+        “Your Captain King has been too much trouble.  He has
+        taken money from the Germans.  He adopted native dress.
+        He called himself Kurram Khan.  He slew his own brother
+        at night in the Khyber Pass.  These men will say that
+        he carried the head to Khinjan, and their word is true.
+        I, Yasmini, saw.  He used the head for a passport to
+        obtain admittance.  He proclaims a jihad!  He urges
+        invasion of India!  He held up his brother's head before
+        five thousand men and boasted of the murder.  The next
+        you shall hear of your Captain King of the Khyber Rifles
+        he will be leading a jihad into India.  You would have
+        better trusted me.  Yasmini.”
+
+“Too bad about your brother,” said the general.
+
+“The body is buried. How much is true about the head?”
+
+King told him.
+
+“Where's she?” asked the general.
+
+King did not answer. The general waited.
+
+“I don't know, sir.”
+
+“Ask the Rangar,” Courtenay suggested.
+
+“Where is he?” asked King.
+
+“Caught him coming down the Khyber on his black mare and arrested him.
+He's in the next room! I hope he's to be hanged. So that I can buy the
+mare,” he added cheerfully.
+
+King whistled softly to himself, and the general looked at him through
+half-closed eyes.
+
+“Go in and talk to him, King. Let me know the result.”
+
+He had picked King to go up the Khyber on that errand not for nothing.
+He knew King and he knew the symptoms. Without answering him King
+obeyed. He went out of the room into a dark corridor and rapped on the
+door of the next room to the right. There was a muffled answer from
+within. Courtenay shouted something to the sentry outside the door and
+he called another man who fitted a key in the lock. King walked into a
+room in which one lamp was burning and the door slammed shut behind him.
+
+He was in there an hour, and it never did transpire just what passed,
+for he can hold his tongue on any subject like a clam, and the general,
+if anything, can go him one better. Courtenay was placed under orders
+not to talk, so those who say they know exactly what happened in the
+room between the time when the door was shut on King and the time when
+he knocked to have it opened and called for the general, are not telling
+the truth.
+
+What is known is that finally the general hurried through the door and
+ejaculated, “Well, I'm damned!” before it could close again. The sentry
+(Punjabi Mussulman) has sworn to that over a dozen camp-fires since the
+day.
+
+And it is known, too, for the sentry has taken oath on it and has told
+the story so many times without much variation that no one who knows the
+man's record doubts any longer--it is known that when the door opened
+again King and the general walked out, with the Rangar between them. And
+the Rangar had no turban on, but carried it unwound in his hand. And his
+golden hair fell nearly to his knees and changed his whole appearance.
+And he was weeping. And he was not a Rangar at all, but she, and how
+anybody can ever have mistaken her for a man, even in man's clothes and
+with her skin darkened, was beyond the sentry's power to guess. He for
+one, etc.... But nobody believed that part of his tale.
+
+As Yussuf bin Ali said over the camp-fire up the Khyber later on, “When
+she sets out to disguise herself, she is what she will be, and he who
+says he thinks otherwise has two tongues and no conscience!”
+
+What is surely true is that the four of them--Yasmini, the general,
+Courtenay and King sat up all night in a room in the fort, talking
+together, while a succession of sentries overstrained their ears
+endeavoring to hear through keyholes. And the sentries heard nothing and
+invented very much.
+
+But Partan Singh, the Sikh, who carried in bread and cocoa to them at
+about five the next morning and found them still talking, heard King
+say, “So, in my opinion, sir, there'll be no jihad in these parts.
+There'll be sporadic raids, of course, but nothing a brigade can't deal
+with. The heart of the holy war's torn out and thrown away.”
+
+“Very well,” said the general. “You can get up the Khyber again and join
+your regiment.”'
+
+But by that time the Rangar's turban was on again and the tears were
+dry, and it was Partan Singh who threw most doubt on the sentry's tale
+about the golden hair. But, as the sentry said, no doubt Partan Singh
+was jealous.
+
+There is no doubt whatever that the general went back to Peshawur in the
+train at eight o'clock and that the Rangar went with him in a separate
+compartment with about a dozen Hillmen chosen from among those who had
+come down with King.
+
+And it is certain that before they went King had a talk with the Rangar
+in a room alone, of which conversation, however, the sentry reported
+afterward that he did not overhear one word; and he had to go to the
+doctor with a cold in his ear at that. He said he was nearly sure he
+heard weeping. But on the other hand, those who saw both of them come
+out were certain that both were smiling.
+
+It is quite certain that Athelstan King went up the Khyber again, for
+the official records say so, and they never lie, especially in time of
+war. He rode a coal-black mare, and Courtenay called him “Chikki”--a
+“lifter.”
+
+Some say the Rangar went to Delhi. Some say Yasmini is in Delhi. Some
+say no. But it is quite certain that before he started up the Khyber
+King showed Courtenay a great gold bracelet that he had under his
+sleeve. Five men saw him do it.
+
+And if that was really Rewa Gunga in the general's train, why was the
+general so painfully polite to him? And why did Ismail insist on riding
+in the train, instead of accepting King's offer to go up the Khyber with
+him?
+
+One thing is very certain. King was right about the jihad. There has
+been none in spite of all Turkey's and Germany's efforts. There have
+been sporadic raids, much as usual, but nothing one brigade could not
+easily deal with, the paid press to the contrary notwithstanding.
+
+King of the Khyber Rifles is now a major, for you can see that by
+turning up the army list.
+
+But if you wish to know just what transpired in the room in Jamrud Fort
+while the general and Courtenay waited, you must ask King--if you dare;
+for only he knows, and one other. It is not likely you can find the
+other.
+
+But it is likely that you may hear from both of them again, for “A woman
+and intrigue are one!” as India says. The war seems long, and the world
+is large, and the chances for intrigue are almost infinite, given such
+combination as King and Yasmini and a love affair.
+
+And as King says on occasion: “Kuch dar nahin hai! There is no such
+thing as fear!” Another one might say, “The roof's the limit!”
+
+And bear in mind, for this is important: King wrote to Yasmini a letter,
+in Urdu from the mullah's cave, in which he as good as gave her his word
+of honor to be her “loyal servant” should she choose to return to her
+allegiance. He is no splitter of hairs, no quibbler. His word is good on
+the darkest night or wherever he casts a shadow in the sun.
+
+“A man and his promise--a woman and intrigue--are one!”
+
+
+The End
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's King--of the Khyber Rifles, by Talbot Mundy
+
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diff --git a/old/old-2024-02-07/6066-0.zip b/old/old-2024-02-07/6066-0.zip
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      King--of the Khyber Rifles, by Talbot Mundy
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of King--of the Khyber Rifles, by Talbot Mundy
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: King--of the Khyber Rifles
+       A Romance of Adventure
+
+Author: Talbot Mundy
+
+Release Date: July, 2004  [EBook #6066]
+Last Updated: March 16, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KING--OF THE KHYBER RIFLES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by M.R.J., and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      KING--OF THE KHYBER RIFLES
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      A Romance of Adventure
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+
+
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Talbot Mundy
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+
+
+
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+
+
+
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+
+
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0001"> Chapter I </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0002"> Chapter II </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0003"> Chapter III </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0004"> Chapter IV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0005"> Chapter V </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0006"> Chapter VI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0007"> Chapter VII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0008"> Chapter VIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0009"> Chapter IX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0010"> Chapter X </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0011"> Chapter XI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0012"> Chapter XII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0013"> Chapter XIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0014"> Chapter XIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0015"> Chapter XV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0016"> Chapter XVI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0017"> Chapter XVII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0018"> Chapter XVIII </a>
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+
+
+
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+
+
+ <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter I
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Suckled were we in a school unkind
+     On suddenly snatched deduction
+     And ever ahead of you (never behind!)
+     Over the border our tracks you'll find,
+     Wherever some idiot feels inclined
+     To scatter the seeds of ruction.
+
+     For eyes we be, of Empire, we!
+     Skinned and Puckered and quick to see
+     And nobody guesses how wise we be.
+     Unwilling to advertise we be.
+     But, hot on the trail of ties, we be
+     The pullers of roots of ruction!
+
+     --Son of the Indian Secret Service
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The men who govern India--more power to them and her!--are few.
+      Those who stand in their way and pretend to help them with a flood of
+      words are a host. And from the host goes up an endless cry that India is
+      the home of thugs, and of three hundred million hungry ones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The men who know--and Athelstan King might claim to know a little--answer
+      that she is the original home of chivalry and the modern mistress of as
+      many decent, gallant, native gentlemen as ever graced a page of history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The charge has seen the light in print that India--well-spring of
+      plague and sudden death and money-lenders--has sold her soul to
+      twenty succeeding conquerors in turn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Athelstan King and a hundred like him whom India has picked from British
+      stock and taught, can answer truly that she has won it back again from
+      each by very purity of purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So when the world war broke the world was destined to be surprised on
+      India's account. The Red Sea, full of racing transports crowded with
+      dark-skinned gentlemen, whose one prayer was that the war might not be
+      over before they should have struck a blow for Britain, was the Indian
+      army's answer to the press.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rest of India paid its taxes and contributed and muzzled itself and
+      set to work to make supplies. For they understand in India, almost as
+      nowhere else, the meaning of such old-fashioned words as gratitude and
+      honor; and of such platitudes as, &ldquo;Give and it shall be given unto you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      More than one nation was deeply shocked by India's answer to &ldquo;practises&rdquo;
+       that had extended over years. But there were men in India who learned to
+      love India long ago with that love that casts out fear, who knew exactly
+      what was going to happen and could therefore afford to wait for orders
+      instead of running round in rings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Athelstan King, for instance, nothing yet but a captain unattached, sat in
+      meagerly furnished quarters with his heels on a table. He is not a doctor,
+      yet he read a book on surgery, and when he went over to the club he
+      carried the book under his arm and continued to read it there. He is
+      considered a rotten conversationalist, and he did nothing at the club to
+      improve his reputation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Man alive--get a move on!&rdquo; gasped a wondering senior, accepting a
+      cigar. Nobody knows where he gets those long, strong, black cheroots, and
+      nobody ever refuses one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks--got a book to read,&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ass! Wake up and grab the best thing in sight, as a stepping stone to
+      something better! Wake up and worry!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King grinned. You have to when you don't agree with a senior officer, for
+      the army is like a school in many more ways than one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Help yourself, sir! I'll take the job that's left when the scramble's
+      over. Something good's sure to be overlooked.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;White feather? Laziness? Dark Horse?&rdquo; the major wondered. Then he hurried
+      away to write telegrams, because a belief thrives in the early days of any
+      war that influence can make or break a man's chances. In the other room
+      where the telegraph blanks were littered in confusion all about the floor,
+      he ran into a crony whose chief sore point was Athelstan King, loathing
+      him as some men loathe pickles or sardines, for no real reason whatever,
+      except that they are what they are.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Saw you talking to King,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Can't make him out. Rum fellow!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rum? Huh! Trouble is he's seventh of his family in succession to serve in
+      India. She has seeped into him and pickled his heritage. He's a believer
+      in Kismet crossed on to Opportunity. Not sure he doesn't pray to Allah on
+      the sly! Hopeless case.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you sure?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So they all sent telegrams and forgot King who sat and smoked and read
+      about surgery; and before he had nearly finished one box of cheroots a
+      general at Peshawur wiped a bald red skull and sent him an urgent
+      telegram.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come at once!&rdquo; it said simply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King was at Lahore, but miles don't matter when the dogs of war are
+      loosed. The right man goes to the right place at the exact right time
+      then, and the fool goes to the wall. In that one respect war is better
+      than some kinds of peace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the train on the way to Peshawur he did not talk any more volubly, and
+      a fellow traveler, studying him from the opposite corner of the stifling
+      compartment, catalogued him as &ldquo;quite an ordinary man.&rdquo; But he was of the
+      Public Works Department, which is sorrowfully underpaid and wears emotions
+      on its sleeve for policy's sake, believing of course that all the rest of
+      the world should do the same.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you think we're bound in honor to go to Belgium's aid?&rdquo; he asked.
+      &ldquo;Can you see any way out of it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Haven't looked for one,&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But don't you think--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;I hardly ever think. I'm in the army, don't you know,
+      and don't have to. What's the use of doing somebody else's work?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rotter!&rdquo; thought the P.W.D. man, almost aloud; but King was not troubled
+      by any further forced conversation. Consequently he reached Peshawur
+      comfortable, in spite of the heat. And his genial manner of saluting the
+      full-general who met him with a dog-cart at Peshawur station was something
+      scandalous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is he a lunatic or a relative of royalty?&rdquo; the P.W.D. man wondered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Full-generals, particularly in the early days of war, do not drive to the
+      station to meet captains very often; yet King climbed into the dog-cart
+      unexcitedly, after keeping the general waiting while he checked a trunk!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The general cracked his whip without any other comment than a smile. A
+      blood mare tore sparks out of the macadam, and a dusty military road began
+      to ribbon out between the wheels. Sentries in unexpected places announced
+      themselves with a ring of shaken steel as their rifles came to the
+      &ldquo;present,&rdquo; which courtesies the general noticed with a raised whip. Then a
+      fox-terrier resumed his chase of squirrels between the planted
+      shade-trees, and Peshawur became normal, shimmering in light and heat
+      reflected from the &ldquo;Hills.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (The P.W.D. man, who would have giggled if a general mentioned him by
+      name, walked because no conveyance could be hired. Judgment was in the
+      wind.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the dog-cart's high front seat, staring straight ahead of him between
+      the horse's ears, King listened. The general did nearly all the talking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The North's the danger.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King grunted with the lids half-lowered over full dark eyes. He did not
+      look especially handsome in that attitude. Some men swear he looks like a
+      Roman, and others liken him to a gargoyle, all of them choosing to ignore
+      the smile that can transform his whole face instantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We're denuding India of troops--not keeping back more than a mere
+      handful to hold the tribes in check.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King nodded. There has never been peace along the northwest border. It did
+      not need vision to foresee trouble from that quarter. In fact it must have
+      been partly on the strength of some of King's reports that the general was
+      planning now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was a very small handful of Sikhs you named as likely to give
+      trouble. Did you do that job thoroughly?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King grunted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well--Delhi's chock-full of spies, all listening to stories made in
+      Germany for them to take back to the 'Hills' with 'em. The tribes'll know
+      presently how many men we're sending oversea. There've been rumors about
+      Khinjan by the hundred lately. They're cooking something. Can you imagine
+      'em keeping quiet now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That depends, sir. Yes, I can imagine it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The general laughed. &ldquo;That's why I sent for you. I need a man with
+      imagination! There's a woman you've got to work with on this occasion who
+      can imagine a shade or two too much. What's worse, she's ambitious. So I
+      chose you to work with her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King's lips stiffened under his mustache, and the corners of his eyes
+      wrinkled into crow's-feet to correspond. Eyes are never coal-black, of
+      course, but his looked it at that minute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know we've sent men to Khinjan who are said to have entered the
+      Caves. Not one of 'em has ever returned.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King frowned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She claims she can enter the Caves and come out again at pleasure. She
+      has offered to do it, and I have accepted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It would not have been polite to look incredulous, so King's expression
+      changed to one of intense interest a little overdone, as the general did
+      not fail to notice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If she hadn't given proof of devotion and ability, I'd have turned her
+      down. But she has. Only the other day she uncovered a plot in Delhi--about
+      a million dynamite bombs in a ruined temple in charge of a German agent
+      for use by mutineers supposed to be ready to rise against us. Fact! Can
+      you guess who she is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not Yasmini?&rdquo; King hazarded, and the general nodded and flicked his whip.
+      The horse mistook it for a signal, and it was two minutes before the speed
+      was reduced to mere recklessness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The helmet-strap mark, printed indelibly on King's jaw and cheek by the
+      Indian sun, tightened and grew whiter--as the general noted out of
+      the corner of his eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Know her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Know of her, of course, sir. Everybody does. Never met her to my
+      knowledge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Um-m-m! Whose fault was that? Somebody ought to have seen to that. Go to
+      Delhi now and meet her. I'll send her a wire to say you're coming. She
+      knows I've chosen you. She tried to insist on full discretion, but I
+      overruled her. Between us two, she'll have discretion once she gets beyond
+      Jamrud. The 'Hills' are full of our spies, of course, but none of 'em dare
+      try Khinjan Caves any more and you'll be the only check we shall have on
+      her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King's tongue licked his lips, and his eyes wrinkled. The general's voice
+      became the least shade more authoritative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When you see her, get a pass from her that'll take you into Khinjan
+      Caves! Ask her for it! For the sake of appearances I'll gazette you
+      Seconded to the Khyber Rifles. For the sake of success, get a pass from
+      her!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've a brother in the Khyber Rifles, haven't you? Was it you or your
+      brother who visited Khinjan once and sent in a report?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke without pride. Even the brigade of British-Indian cavalry that
+      went to Khinjan on the strength of his report and leveled its defenses
+      with the ground, had not been able to find the famous Caves. Yet the Caves
+      themselves are a by-word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's talk of a jihad (holy war). There's worse than that! When you
+      went to Khinjan, what was your chief object?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To find the source of the everlasting rumors about the so-called 'Heart
+      of the Hills,' sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, yes. I remember. I read your report. You didn't find anything, did
+      you? Well. The story is now that the 'Heart of the Hills' has come to
+      life. So the spies say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King whistled softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's no guessing what it means,&rdquo; said the general. &ldquo;Go and find out.
+      Go and work with Yasmini. I shall have enough men here to attack instantly
+      and smash any small force as soon as it begins to gather anywhere near the
+      border. But Khinjan is another story. We can't prove anything, but the
+      spies keep bringing in rumors of ten thousand men in Khinjan Caves, and of
+      another large lashkar not far away from Khinjan. There must be no jihad,
+      King! India is all but defenseless! We can tackle sporadic raids. We can
+      even handle an ordinary raid in force. But this story about a 'Heart of
+      the Hills' coming to life may presage unity of action and a holy war such
+      as the world has not seen. Go up there and stop it if you can. At least,
+      let me know the facts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King grunted. To stop a holy war single-handed would be rather like
+      stopping the wind--possibly easy enough, if one knew the way. Yet he
+      knew no general would throw away a man like himself on a useless venture.
+      He began to look happy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The general clucked to the mare and the big beast sank an inch between the
+      shafts. The sais behind set his feet against the drop-board and clung with
+      both hands to the seat. One wheel ceased to touch the gravel as they
+      whirled along a semicircular drive. Suddenly the mare drew up on her
+      haunches, under the porch of a pretentious residence. Sentries saluted.
+      The sais swung down. In less than sixty seconds King was following the
+      general through a wide entrance into a crowded hall. The instant the
+      general's fat figure darkened the doorway twenty men of higher rank than
+      King, native and English, rose from lined-up chairs and pressed forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sorry--have to keep you all waiting--busy!&rdquo; He waved them aside
+      with a little apologetic gesture. &ldquo;Come in here, King.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King followed him through a door that slammed tight behind them on rubber
+      jambs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The general unlocked a steel drawer and began to rummage among the papers
+      in it. In a minute he produced a package, bound in rubber bands, with a
+      faded photograph face-upward on the top.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's the woman! How d'you like the look of her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King took the package and for a minute stared hard at the likeness of a
+      woman whose fame has traveled up and down India, until her witchery has
+      become a proverb. She was dressed as a dancing woman, yet very few dancing
+      women could afford to be dressed as she was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King's service uses whom it may, and he had met and talked with many
+      dancing women in the course of duty; but as he stared at Yasmini's
+      likeness he did not think he had ever met one who so measured up to rumor.
+      The nautch he knew for a delusion. Yet--!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The general watched his face with eyes that missed nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Remember--I said work with her!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King looked up and nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They say she's three parts Russian,&rdquo; said the general. &ldquo;To my own
+      knowledge she speaks Russian like a native, and about twenty other tongues
+      as well, including English. She speaks English as well as you or I. She
+      was the girl-widow of a rascally Hill-rajah. There's a story I've heard,
+      to the effect that Russia arranged her marriage in the day when India was
+      Russia's objective--and that's how long ago?--seems like weeks,
+      not years! I've heard she loved her rajah. And I've heard she didn't!
+      There's another story that she poisoned him. I know she got away with his
+      money--and that's proof enough of brains! Some say she's a she-devil.
+      I think that's an exaggeration, but bear in mind she's dangerous!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King grinned. A man who trusts Eastern women over readily does not rise
+      far in the Secret Service.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you've got nous enough to keep on her soft side and use her--not
+      let her use you--you can keep the 'Hills' quiet and the Khyber safe!
+      If you can contrive that--now--in this pinch--there's no
+      limit for you! Commander-in-chief shall be your job before you're sixty!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King pocketed the photograph and papers. &ldquo;I'm well enough content, sir, as
+      things are,&rdquo; he said quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, remember she's ambitious, even if you're not! I'm not preaching
+      ambition, mind--I'm warning you! Ambition's bad! Study those papers
+      on your way down to Delhi and see that I get them back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The general paced once across the room and once back again, with hands
+      behind him. Then he stopped in front of King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No man in India has a stiffer task than you have now! It may encourage
+      you to know that I realize that! She's the key to the puzzle, and she
+      happens to be in Delhi. Go to Delhi, then. A jihad launched from the
+      'Hills' would mean anarchy in the plains. That would entail sending back
+      from France an army that can't be spared. There must be no jihad, King!--There
+      must--not--be--one! Keep that in your head!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What arrangements have been made with her, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Practically none! She's watching the spies in Delhi, but they're likely
+      to break for the 'Hills' any minute. Then they'll be arrested. When that
+      happens the fate of India may be in your hands and hers! Get out of my way
+      now, until tiffin-time!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In a way that some men never learn, King proceeded to efface himself
+      entirely among the crowd in the hall, contriving to say nothing of any
+      account to anybody until the great gong boomed and the general led them
+      all in to his long dining table. Yet he did not look furtive or secretive.
+      Nobody noticed him, and he noticed everybody. There is nothing whatever
+      secretive about that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fare was plain, and the meal a perfunctory affair. The general and his
+      guests were there for other reason than to eat food, and only the man who
+      happened to seat himself next to King--a major by the name of Hyde--spoke
+      to him at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why aren't you with your regiment?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because the general asked me to lunch, sir!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you've been pestering him for an appointment!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King, with his mouth full of curry did not answer, but his eyes smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's astonishing to me,&rdquo; said the major, &ldquo;that a captain should leave his
+      company when war has begun! When I was captain I'd have been driven out of
+      the service if I'd asked for leave of absence at such a time!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King made no comment, but his expression denoted belief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you bound for the front, sir?&rdquo; he asked presently. But Hyde did not
+      answer. They finished the meal in silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After lunch he was closeted with the general again for twenty minutes.
+      Then one of the general's carriages took him to the station; and it did
+      not appear to trouble him at all that the other occupant of the carriage
+      was the self-same Major Hyde who had sat next him at lunch. In fact, he
+      smiled so pleasantly that Hyde grew exasperated. Neither of them spoke. At
+      the station Hyde lost his temper openly, and King left him abusing an
+      unhappy native servant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The station was crammed to suffocation by a crowd that roared and writhed
+      and smelt to high heaven. At one end of the platform, in the midst of a
+      human eddy, a frenzied horse resisted with his teeth and all four feet at
+      once the efforts of six natives and a British sergeant to force him into a
+      loose-box. At the back of the same platform the little dark-brown mules of
+      a mountain battery twitched their flanks in line, jingling chains and
+      stamping when the flies bit home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Flies buzzed everywhere. Fat native merchants vied with lean and timid
+      ones in noisy effort to secure accommodation on a train already crowded to
+      the limit. Twenty British officers hunted up and down for the places
+      supposed to have been reserved for them, and sweating servants hurried
+      after them with arms full of heterogeneous baggage, swearing at the crowd
+      that swore back ungrudgingly. But the general himself had telephoned for
+      King's reservation, so he took his time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were din and stink and dust beneath a savage sun, shaken into
+      reverberations by the scream of an engine's safety valve. It was India in
+      essence and awake!--India arising out of lethargy!--India as she
+      is more often nowadays--and it made King, for the time being of the
+      Khyber Rifles, happier than some other men can be in ballrooms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Any one who watched him--and there was at least one man who did--must
+      have noticed his strange ability, almost like that of water, to reach the
+      point he aimed for, through, and not around, the crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He neither shoved nor argued. Orders and blows would have been equally
+      useless, for had it tried the crowd could not have obeyed, and it was in
+      no mind to try. Without the least apparent effort he arrived--and
+      there is no other word that quite describes it--he arrived, through
+      the densest part of the sweating throng of humans, at the door of the
+      luggage office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There, though a bunnia's sharp elbow nagged his ribs, and the bunnia's
+      servant dropped a heavy package on his foot, he smiled so genially that he
+      melted the wrath of the frantic luggage clerk. But not at once. Even the
+      sun needs seconds to melt ice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I God?&rdquo; the babu wailed. &ldquo;Can I do all the-e things in all the-e world
+      at once if not sooner?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King's smile began to get its work in. The man ceased gesticulating to
+      wipe sweat from his stubbly jowl with the end of a Punjabi headdress. He
+      actually smiled back. Who was he, that he should suspect new outrage or
+      guess he was about to be used in a game he did not understand? He would
+      have stopped all work to beg for extra pay at the merest suggestion of
+      such a thing; but as it was he raised both fists and lapsed into his own
+      tongue to apostrophize the ruffian who dared jostle King. A Northerner who
+      did not seem to understand Punjabi almost cost King his balance as he
+      thrust broad shoulders between him and the bunnia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bunnia chattered like an outraged ape; but King, the person most
+      entitled to be angry, actually apologized! That being a miracle, the babu
+      forthwith wrought another one, and within a minute King's one trunk was
+      checked through to Delhi.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Delhi is right, sahib?&rdquo; he asked, to make doubly sure; for in India where
+      the milk of human kindness is not hawked in the market-place, men will pay
+      over-measure for a smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Delhi is right. Thank you, babuji.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made more room for the Hillman, beaming amusement at the man's
+      impatience; but the Hillman had no luggage and turned away, making an
+      unexpected effort to hide his face with a turban end. He who had forced
+      his way to the front with so much violence and haste now burst back again
+      toward the train like a football forward tearing through the thick of his
+      opponents. He scattered a swath a yard wide, for he had shoulders like a
+      bull. King saw him leap into third-class carriage. He saw, too, that he
+      was not wanted in the carriage. There was a storm of protest from
+      tight-packed native passengers, but the fellow had his way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The swath through the crowd closed up like water in a ship's wake, but it
+      opened again for King. He smiled so humorously that the angry jostled ones
+      smiled too and were appeased, forgetting haste and bruises and indignity
+      merely because understanding looked at them through merry eyes. All crowds
+      are that way, but an Indian crowd more so than all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Taking his time, and falling foul of nobody, King marked down a native
+      constable--hot and unhappy, leaning with his back against the train.
+      He touched him on the shoulder and the fellow jumped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, sahib! I am only constabeel--I know nothing--I can do
+      nothing! The teerain goes when it goes, and then perhaps we will beat
+      these people from the platform and make room again! But there is no
+      authority--no law any more--they are all gone mad!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King wrote on a pad, tore off a sheet, folded it and gave it to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is for the Superintendent of Police at the office. Carriage number
+      1181, eleven doors from here--the one with the shut door and a big
+      Hillman inside sitting three places from the door facing the engine. Get
+      the Hillman! No, there is only one Hillman in the carriage. No, the others
+      are not his friends; they will not help him. He will fight, but he has no
+      friends in that carriage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;constabeel&rdquo; obeyed, not very cheerfully. King stood to watch him with
+      a foot on the step of a first-class coach. Another constable passed him,
+      elbowing a snail's progress between the train and the crowd. He seized the
+      man's arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go and help that man!&rdquo; he ordered. &ldquo;Hurry!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he climbed into the carriage and leaned from the window. He grinned
+      as he saw both constables pounce on a third-class carriage door and, with
+      the yell of good huntsmen who have viewed, seize the protesting Northerner
+      by the leg and begin to drag him forth. There was a fight, that lasted
+      three minutes, in the course of which a long knife flashed. But there were
+      plenty to help take the knife away, and the Hillman stood handcuffed and
+      sullen at last, while one of his captors bound a cut forearm. Then they
+      dragged him away; but not before he had seen King at the window, and had
+      lipped a silent threat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe you, my son!&rdquo; King chuckled, half aloud. &ldquo;I surely believe you!
+      I'll watch! Ham dekta hai!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why was that man arrested?&rdquo; asked an acid voice behind him; and without
+      troubling to turn his head, he knew that Major Hyde was to be his carriage
+      mate again. To be vindictive, on duty or off it, is foolishness; but to
+      let opportunity slip by one is a crime. He looked glad, not sorry, as he
+      faced about--pleased, not disappointed--like a man on a desert
+      island who has found a tool.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why was that man arrested?&rdquo; the major asked again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ordered it,&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I imagined. I asked you why.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King stared at him and then turned to watch the prisoner being dragged
+      away; he was fighting again, striking at his captors' heads with
+      handcuffed wrists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does he look innocent?&rdquo; asked King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that your answer?&rdquo; asked the major. Balked ambition is an ugly horse
+      to ride. He had tried for a command but had been shelved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have sufficient authority,&rdquo; said King, unruffled. He spoke as if he
+      were thinking of something entirely different. His eyes were as if they
+      saw the major from a very long way off and rather approved of him on the
+      whole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Show me your authority, please!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King dived into an inner pocket and produced a card that had about ten
+      words written on its face, above a general's signature. Hyde read it and
+      passed it back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So you're one of those, are you!&rdquo; he said in a tone of voice that would
+      start a fight in some parts of the world and in some services. But King
+      nodded cheerfully, and that annoyed the major more than ever; he snorted,
+      closed his mouth with a snap and turned to rearrange the sheet and pillow
+      on his berth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the train pulled out, amid a din of voices from the left-behind
+      that nearly drowned the panting of overloaded engine. There was a roar of
+      joy from the two coaches full of soldiers in the rear--a shriek from
+      a woman who had missed the train--a babel of farewells tossed back
+      and forth between the platform and the third-class carriages--and
+      Peshawur fell away behind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King settled down on his side of the compartment, after a struggle with
+      the thermantidote that refused to work. There was heat enough below the
+      roof to have roasted meat, so that the physical atmosphere became as
+      turgid as the mental after a little while.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hyde all but stripped himself and drew on striped pajamas. King was
+      content to lie in shirt-sleeves on the other berth, with knees raised, so
+      that Hyde could not overlook the general's papers. At his ease he studied
+      them one by one, memorizing a string of names, with details as to their
+      owners' antecedents and probable present whereabouts. There were several
+      photographs in the packet, and he studied them very carefully indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But much most carefully of all he examined Yasmini's portrait, returning
+      to it again and again. He reached the conclusion in the end that when it
+      was taken she had been cunningly disguised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This was intended for purpose of identification at a given time and
+      place,&rdquo; he told himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Were you muttering at me?&rdquo; asked Hyde.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It looked extremely like it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My mistake, sir. Nothing of the sort intended.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H-rrrrr-ummmmmph!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hyde turned an indignant back on him, and King studied the back as if he
+      found it interesting. On the whole he looked sympathetic, so it was as
+      well that Hyde did not look around. Balked ambition as a rule loathes
+      sympathy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After many prickly-hot, interminable, jolting hours the train drew up at
+      Rawal-Pindi station. Instantly King was on his feet with his tunic on, and
+      he was out on the blazing hot platform before the train's motion had quite
+      ceased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to walk up and down, not elbowing but percolating through the
+      crowd, missing nothing worth noticing in all the hot kaleidoscope and
+      seeming to find new amusement at every turn. It was not in the least
+      astonishing that a well-dressed native should address him presently, for
+      he looked genial enough to be asked to hold a baby. King himself did not
+      seem surprised at all. Far from it; he looked pleased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Excuse me, sir,&rdquo; said the man in glib babu English. &ldquo;I am seeking Captain
+      King sahib, for whom my brother is veree anxious to be servant. Can you
+      kindlee tell me, sir, where I could find Captain King sahib?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; King answered him. He looked glad to be of help. &ldquo;Are you
+      traveling on this train?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The question sounded like politeness welling from the lips of unsuspicion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir. I am traveling from this place where I have spent a few days,
+      to Bombay, where my business is.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did you know King sahib is on the train?&rdquo; King asked him, smiling so
+      genially that even the police could not have charged him with more than
+      curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By telegram, sir. My brother had the misfortune to miss Captain King
+      sahib at Peshawur and therefore sent a telegram to me asking me to do what
+      I can at an interview.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;I see.&rdquo; And judging by the sparkle in his eyes as he
+      looked away he could see a lot. But the native could not see his eyes at
+      that instant, although he tried to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked back at the train, giving the man a good chance to study his
+      face in profile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, thank you, sir!&rdquo; said the native oilily. &ldquo;You are most kind! I am
+      your humble servant, sir!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King nodded good-by to him, his dark eyes in the shadow of the khaki
+      helmet seeming scarcely interested any longer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Couldn't you find another berth?&rdquo; Hyde asked him angrily when he stepped
+      back into the compartment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What were you out there looking for?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King smiled back at him blandly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think there are railway thieves on the train,&rdquo; he announced without any
+      effort at relevance. He might not have heard the question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What makes you think so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Observation, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! Then if you've seen thieves, why didn't you have 'em arrested? You
+      were precious free with that authority of yours on Peshawur platform!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps you'd care to take the responsibility, sir? Let me point out one
+      of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Full of grudging curiosity Hyde came to stand by him, and King stepped
+      back just as the train began to move.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That man, sir--over there--no, beyond him--there!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hyde thrust head and shoulders through the window, and a well-dressed
+      native with one foot on the running-board at the back end of the train
+      took a long steady stare at him before jumping in and slamming the door of
+      a third-class carriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which one?&rdquo; demanded Hyde impatiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't see him now, sir!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hyde snorted and returned to his seat in the silence of unspeakable scorn.
+      But presently he opened a suitcase and drew out a repeating pistol which
+      he cocked carefully and stowed beneath his pillow; not at all a
+      contemptible move, because the Indian railway thief is the most
+      resourceful specialist in the world. But King took no overt precautions of
+      any kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After more interminable hours night shut down on them, red-hot,
+      black-dark, mesmerically subdivided into seconds by the thump of carriage
+      wheels and lit at intervals by showers of sparks from the gasping engine.
+      The din of Babel rode behind the first-class carriages, for all the
+      natives in the packed third-class talked all together. (In India, when one
+      has spent a fortune on a third-class ticket, one proceeds to enjoy the
+      ride.) The train was a Beast out of Revelation, wallowing in noise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But after other, hotter hours the talking ceased. Then King, strangely
+      without kicking off his shoes, drew a sheet up over his shoulders. On the
+      opposite berth Hyde covered his head, to keep dust out of his hair, and
+      presently King heard him begin to snore gently. Then, very carefully he
+      adjusted his own position so that his profile lay outlined in the dim
+      light from the gas lamp in the roof. He might almost have been waiting to
+      be shaved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stuffiness increased to a degree that is sometimes preached in
+      Christian churches as belonging to a sulphurous sphere beyond the grave.
+      Yet he did not move a muscle. It was long after midnight when his vigil
+      was rewarded by a slight sound at the door. From that instant his eyes
+      were on the watch, under dark of closed lashes; but his even breathing was
+      that of the seventh stage of sleep that knows no dreams.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A click of the door-latch heralded the appearance of a hand. With skill,
+      of the sort that only special training can develop, a man in native dress
+      insinuated himself into the carriage without making another sound of any
+      kind. King's ears are part of the equipment for his exacting business, but
+      he could not hear the door click shut again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For about five minutes, while the train swayed head-long into Indian
+      darkness, the man stood listening and watching King's face. He stood so
+      near that King recognized him for the one who had accosted him on
+      Rawal-Pindi platform. And he could see the outline of the knife-hilt that
+      the man's fingers clutched underneath his shirt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He'll either strike first, so as to kill us both and do the looting
+      afterward--and in that case I think it will be easier to break his
+      neck than his arm--yes, decidedly his neck; it's long and thin;--or--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His eyes feigned sleep so successfully that the native turned away at
+      last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thought so!&rdquo; He dared open his eyes a mite wider. &ldquo;He's pukka--true
+      to type! Rob first and then kill! Rule number one with his sort, run when
+      you've stabbed! Not a bad rule either, from their point of view!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As he watched, the thief drew the sheet back from Hyde's face, with
+      trained fingers that could have taken spectacles from the victims' nose
+      without his knowledge. Then as fish glide in and out among the reeds
+      without touching them, swift and soft and unseen, his fingers searched
+      Hyde's body. They found nothing. So they dived under the pillow and
+      brought out the pistol and a gold watch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that he began to search the clothes that hung on a hook beside
+      Hyde's berth. He brought forth papers and a pocketbook--then money.
+      Money went into one bag--papers and pocketbook into another. And that
+      was evidence enough as well as risk enough. The knife would be due in a
+      minute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King moved in his sleep, rather noisily, and the movement knocked a book
+      to the floor from the foot of his berth. The noise of that awoke Hyde, and
+      King pretended to begin to wake, yawning and rolling on his back (that
+      being much the safest position an unarmed man can take and much the most
+      awkward for his enemy).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thieves!&rdquo; Hyde yelled at the top of his lungs, groping wildly for his
+      pistol and not finding it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King sat up and rubbed his eyes. The native drew the knife, and--believing
+      himself in command of the situation--hesitated for one priceless
+      second. He saw his error and darted for the door too late. With a movement
+      unbelievably swift King was there ahead of him; and with another movement
+      not so swift, but much more disconcerting, he threw his sheet as the
+      retiarius used to throw a net in ancient Rome. It wrapped round the
+      native's head and arms, and the two went together to the floor in a
+      twisted stranglehold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In another half-minute the native was groaning, for King had his
+      knife-wrist in two hands and was bending it backward while he pressed the
+      man's stomach with his knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get his loot!&rdquo; he panted between efforts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The knife fell to the floor, and the thief made a gallant effort to
+      recover it, but King was too strong for him. He seized the knife himself,
+      slipped it in his own bosom and resumed his hold before the native guessed
+      what he was after. Then he kept a tight grip while Hyde knelt to grope for
+      his missing property. The major found both the thief's bags, and held them
+      up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I expect that's all,&rdquo; said King, loosening his grip very gradually. The
+      native noticed--as Hyde did not--that King had begun to seem
+      almost absent-minded; the thief lay quite still, looking up, trying to
+      divine his next intention. Suddenly the brakes went on, but King's grip
+      did not tighten. The train began to scream itself to a standstill at a
+      wayside station, and King (the absent-minded)--very nearly grinned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I weren't in such an infernal hurry to reach Bombay--&rdquo; Hyde
+      grumbled; and King nearly laughed aloud then, for the thief knew English,
+      and was listening with all his ears, &ldquo;--may I be damned if I wouldn't
+      get off at this station and wait to see that scoundrel brought to
+      justice!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The train jerked itself to a standstill, and a man with a lantern began to
+      chant the station's name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damn it!--I'm going to Bombay to act censor. I can't wait--they
+      want me there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The instant the train's motion altogether ceased the heat shut in on them
+      as if the lid of Tophet had been slammed. The prickly heat burst out all
+      over Hyde's skin and King's too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Almighty God!&rdquo; gasped Hyde, beginning to fan himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was plenty of excuse for relaxing hold still further, and King made
+      full use of it. A second later he gave a very good pretense of pain in his
+      finger-ends as the thief burst free. The native made a dive at his bosom
+      for the knife, but he frustrated that. Then he made a prodigious effort,
+      just too late, to clutch the man again, and he did succeed in tearing
+      loose a piece of shirt; but the fleeing robber must have wondered, as he
+      bolted into the blacker shadows of the station building, why such an
+      iron-fingered, wide-awake sahib should have made such a truly feeble
+      showing at the end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damn it!--couldn't you hold him? Were you afraid of him, or what?&rdquo;
+       demanded Hyde, beginning to dress himself. Instead of answering, King
+      leaned out into the lamp-lit gloom, and in a minute he caught sight of a
+      sergeant of native infantry passing down the train. He made a sign that
+      brought the man to him on the run.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you see that runaway?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha, sahib. I saw one running. Shall I follow?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. This piece of his shirt will identify him. Take it. Hide it! When a
+      man with a torn shirt, into which that piece fits, makes for the telegraph
+      office after this train has gone on, see that he is allowed to send any
+      telegrams he wants to! Only, have copies of every one of them wired to
+      Captain King, care of the station-master, Delhi. Have you understood?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha, sahib.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Grab him, and lock him up tight afterward--but not until he has sent
+      his telegrams!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Atcha, sahib.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make yourself scarce, then!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Major Hyde was dressed, having performed that military evolution in
+      something less than record time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who was that you were talking to?&rdquo; he demanded. But King continued to
+      look out the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hyde came and tapped on his shoulder impatiently, but King did not seem to
+      understand until the native sergeant had quite vanished into the shadows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me pass, will you!&rdquo; Hyde demanded. &ldquo;I'll have that thief caught if
+      the train has to wait a week while they do it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He pushed past, but he was scarcely on the step when the station-master
+      blew his whistle, and his colored minion waved a lantern back and forth.
+      The engine shrieked forthwith of death and torment; carriage doors slammed
+      shut in staccato series; the heat relaxed as the engine moved--loosened--let
+      go--lifted at last, and a trainload of hot passengers sighed thanks
+      to an unresponsive sky as the train gained speed and wind crept in through
+      the thermantidotes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only through the broken thermantidote in King's compartment no wet air
+      came. Hyde knelt on King's berth and wrestled with it like a caged animal,
+      but with no result except that the sweat poured out all over him and he
+      was more uncomfortable than before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you looking at?&rdquo; he demanded at last, sitting on King's berth.
+      His head swam. He had to wait a few seconds before he could step across to
+      his own side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only a knife,&rdquo; said King. He was standing under the dim gas lamp that
+      helped make the darkness more unbearable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not that robber's knife? Did he drop it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's my knife,&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Strange time to stand staring at it, if it's yours! Didn't you ever see
+      it before?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King stowed the knife away in his bosom, and the major crossed to his own
+      side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm thinking I'll know it again, at all events!&rdquo; King answered, sitting
+      down. &ldquo;Good night, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Within ten minutes Hyde was asleep, snoring prodigiously. Then King pulled
+      out the knife again and studied it for half an hour. The blade was of
+      bronze, with an edge hammered to the keenness of a razor. The hilt was of
+      nearly pure gold, in the form of a woman dancing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole thing was so exquisitely wrought that age had only softened the
+      lines, without in the least impairing them. It looked like one of those
+      Grecian toys with which Roman women of Nero's day stabbed their lovers.
+      But that was not why he began to whistle very softly to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently he drew out the general's package of papers, with the photograph
+      on the top. He stood up, to hold both knife and papers close to the light
+      in the roof.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It needed no great stretch of imagination to suggest a likeness between
+      the woman of the photograph and the other, of the golden knife-hilt. And
+      nobody, looking at him then, would have dared suggest he lacked
+      imagination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the knife had not been so ancient they might have been portraits of the
+      same woman, in the same disguise, taken at the same time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She knew I had been chosen to work with her. The general sent her word
+      that I am coming,&rdquo; he muttered to himself. &ldquo;Man number one had a try for
+      me, but I had him pinched too soon. There must have been a spy watching at
+      Peshawur, who wired to Rawal-Pindi for this man to jump the train and go
+      on with the job. She must have had him planted at Rawal-Pindi in case of
+      accidents. She seems thorough! Why should she give the man a knife with
+      her own portrait on it? Is she queen of a secret society? Well--we
+      shall see!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down on his berth again and sighed, not discontentedly. Then he lit
+      one of his great black cigars and blew rings for five or six minutes. Then
+      he lay back with his head on the pillow, and before five minutes more had
+      gone he was asleep, with the cold cigar still clutched between his
+      fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked as interesting in his sleep as when awake. His mobile face in
+      repose looked Roman, for the sun had tanned his skin and his nose was
+      aquiline. In museums, where sculptured heads of Roman generals and
+      emperors stand around the wall on pedestals, it would not be difficult to
+      pick several that bore more than a faint resemblance to him. He had
+      breadth and depth of forehead and a jowl that lent itself to smiles as
+      well as sternness, and a throat that expressed manly determination in
+      every molded line.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He slept like a boy until dawn; and he and Hyde had scarcely exchanged
+      another dozen words when the train screamed next day into Delhi station.
+      Then he saluted stiffly and was gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Young jackanapes!&rdquo; Hyde muttered after him. &ldquo;Lazy young devil! He ought
+      to be with his regiment, marching and setting a good example to his men!
+      We'll have our work cut out to win this war, if there are many of his
+      stamp! And I'm afraid there are--I'm afraid so--far too many of
+      'em! Pity! Such a pity! If the right men were at the top the youngsters at
+      the foot of the ladder would mind their P's and Q's. As it is, I'm afraid
+      we shall get beaten in this show. Dear, oh, dear!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Being what he was, and consistent before all things, Major Hyde drew out
+      his writing materials there and then and wrote a report against Athelstan
+      King, which he signed, addressed to headquarters and mailed at the first
+      opportunity. There some future historian may find it and draw from it
+      unkind deductions on the morale of the British army.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter II
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     The only things which can not be explained are facts.  So,
+     use 'em. A riddle is proof there is a key to it.  Nor is it
+     a riddle when you've got the key. Life is as simple as all
+     that.--Cocker
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Delhi boasts a round half-dozen railway stations, all of them designed
+      with regard to war, so that to King there was nothing unexpected in the
+      fact that the train had brought him to an unexpected station. He plunged
+      into its crowd much as a man in the mood might plunge into a whirlpool,--laughing
+      as he plunged, for it was the most intoxicating splurge of color, din and
+      smell that even India, the many-peopled--even Delhi, mother of
+      dynasties--ever had evolved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The station echoed--reverberated--hummed. A roar went up of
+      human voices, babbling in twenty tongues, and above that rose in differing
+      degrees the ear-splitting shriek of locomotives, the blare of bugles, the
+      neigh of led horses, the bray of mules, the jingle of gun-chains and the
+      thundering cadence of drilled feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At one minute the whole building shook to the thunder of a grinning
+      regiment; an instant later it clattered to the wrought-steel hammer of a
+      thousand hoofs, as led troop-horses danced into formation to invade the
+      waiting trucks. Loaded trucks banged into one another and thunderclapped
+      their way into the sidings. And soldiers of nearly every Indian military
+      caste stood about everywhere, in what was picturesque confusion to the
+      uninitiated, yet like the letters of an index to a man who knew. And King
+      knew. Down the back of each platform Tommy Atkins stood in long straight
+      lines, talking or munching great sandwiches or smoking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The heat smelt and felt of another world. The din was from the same
+      sphere. Yet everywhere was hope and geniality and by-your-leave as if
+      weddings were in the wind and not the overture to death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Threading his way in and out among the motley swarm with a great black
+      cheroot between his teeth and sweat running into his eyes from his
+      helmet-band, Athelstan King strode at ease--at home--intent--amused--awake--and
+      almost awfully happy. He was not in the least less happy because perfectly
+      aware that a native was following him at a distance, although he did
+      wonder how the native had contrived to pass within the lines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The general at Peshawur had compressed about a ton of miscellaneous
+      information into fifteen hurried minutes, but mostly he had given him
+      leave and orders to inform himself; so the fun was under way of winning
+      exact knowledge in spite of officers, not one of whom would not have grown
+      instantly suspicions at the first asked question. At the end of fifteen
+      minutes there was not a glib staff-officer there who could have deceived
+      him as to the numbers and destination of the force entraining.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kerachi!&rdquo; he told himself, chewing the butt of his cigar and keeping well
+      ahead of the shadowing native. Always keep a &ldquo;shadow&rdquo; moving until you're
+      ready to deal with him is one of Cocker's very soundest rules.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Turkey hasn't taken a hand yet--the general said so. No holy war
+      yet. These'll be held in readiness to cross to Basra in case the Turks
+      begin. While they wait for that at Kerachi the tribes won't dare begin
+      anything. One or two spies are sure to break North and tell them what this
+      force is for--but the tribes won't believe. They'll wait until the
+      force has moved to Basra before they take chances. Good! That means no
+      especial hurry for me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not have to return salutes, because he did not look for them. Very
+      few people noticed him at all, although he was recognized once or twice by
+      former messmates, and one officer stopped him with an out-stretched hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shake hands, you old tramp! Where are you bound for next? Tibet by any
+      chance--or is it Samarkand this time?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, hullo, Carmichel!&rdquo; he answered, beaming instant good-fellowship.
+      &ldquo;Where are you bound for?&rdquo; And the other did not notice that his own
+      question had not been answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bombay! Bombay--Marseilles--Brussels--Berlin!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wish you luck!&rdquo; laughed King, passing on. Every living man there, with
+      the exception of a few staff-officers, believed himself en route for
+      Europe; their faces said as much. Yet King took another look at the piles
+      of stores and at the kits the men carried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who'd take all that stuff to Europe, where they make it?&rdquo; he reflected.
+      &ldquo;And what 'u'd they use camel harness for in France?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At his leisure--in his own way, that was devious and like a string of
+      miracles--he filtered toward the telegraph office. The native who had
+      followed him all this time drew closer, but he did not let himself be
+      troubled by that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He whispered proof of his identity to the telegraph clerk, who was a Royal
+      Engineer, new to that job that morning, and a sealed telegram was handed
+      to him at once. The &ldquo;shadow&rdquo; came very close indeed, presumably to try and
+      read over his shoulder from behind, but he side-stepped into a corner and
+      read the telegram with his back to the wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in English, no doubt to escape suspicion; and because it was
+      war-time, and the censorship had closed on India like a throttling string,
+      it was not in code. So the wording, all things considered, had to be
+      ingenious, for the Mirza Ali, of the Fort, Bombay, to whom it was
+      addressed, could scarcely be expected to read more than between the lines.
+      The lines had to be there to read between.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cattle intended for slaughter,&rdquo; it ran, &ldquo;despatched Bombay on Fourteen
+      down. Meet train. Will be inspected en route, but should be dealt with
+      carefully, on arrival. Cattle inclined to stampede owing to bad scare
+      received to North of Delhi. Take all precautions and notify Abdul.&rdquo; It was
+      signed &ldquo;Suliman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; he chuckled. &ldquo;Let's hope we get Abdul too. I wonder who he is!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Still uninterested in the man who shadowed him, he walked back to the
+      office window and wrote two telegrams; one to Bombay, ordering the arrest
+      of Ali Mirza of the Fort, with an urgent admonition to discover who his
+      man Abdul might be, and to seize him as soon as found; the other to the
+      station in the north, insisting on close confinement for Suliman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't let him out on any terms at all!&rdquo; he wired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That being all the urgent business, he turned leisurely to face his
+      shadow, and the native met his eyes with the engaging frankness of an old
+      friend, coming forward with outstretched hand. They did not shake hands,
+      for King knew better than to fall into the first trap offered him. But the
+      man made a signal with his fingers that is known to not more than a dozen
+      men in all the world, and that changed the situation altogether.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Walk with me,&rdquo; said King, and the man fell into stride beside him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a Rangar,--which is to say a Rajput who, or whose ancestors
+      had turned Muhammadan. Like many Rajputs he was not a big man, but he
+      looked fit and wiry; his head scarcely came above the level of King's
+      chin, although his turban distracted attention from the fact. The turban
+      was of silk and unusually large.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whitest of well-kept teeth, gleaming regularly under a little black
+      waxed mustache betrayed no trace of betel-nut or other nastiness, and
+      neither his fine features nor his eyes suggested vice of the sort that
+      often undermines the character of Rajput youth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On second thoughts, and at the next opportunity to see them, King was not
+      so sure that the eyes were brown, and he changed his opinion about their
+      color a dozen times within the hour. Once he would even have sworn they
+      were green.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man was well-to-do, for his turban was of costly silk, and he was clad
+      in expensive jodpur riding breeches and spurred black riding boots, all
+      perfectly immaculate. The breeches, baggy above and tight, below,
+      suggested the clean lines of cat-like agility and strength.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The upper part of his costume was semi-European. He was a regular Rangar
+      dandy, of the type that can be seen playing polo almost any day at Mount
+      Abu--that gets into mischief with a grace due to practise and
+      heredity--but that does not manage its estates too well, as a rule,
+      nor pay its debts in a hurry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My name is Rewa Gunga,&rdquo; he said in a low voice, looking up sidewise at
+      King a shade too guilelessly. Between Cape Comorin and the Northern Ice
+      guile is normal, and its absence makes the wise suspicious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am Captain King.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a message for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From whom?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From her!&rdquo; said the Rangar, and without exactly knowing why, or being
+      pleased with himself, King felt excited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were walking toward the station exit. King had a trunk check in his
+      hand, but returned it to pocket, not proposing just yet to let this Rangar
+      over-hear instructions regarding the trunk's destination; he was too
+      good-looking and too overbrimming with personal charm to be trusted thus
+      early in the game. Besides, there was that captured knife, that hinted at
+      lies and treachery. Secret signs as well as loot have been stolen before
+      now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd like to walk through the streets and see the crowd.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled as he said that, knowing well that the average young Rajput of
+      good birth would rather fight a tiger with cold steel than walk a mile or
+      two. He drew fire at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why walk, King sahib? Are we animals? There is a carriage waiting--her
+      carriage--and a coachman whose ears were born dead. We might be
+      overheard in the street. Are you and I children, tossing stones into a
+      pool to watch the rings widen!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lead on, then,&rdquo; answered King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Outside the station was a luxuriously modern victoria, with C springs and
+      rubber tires, with horses that would have done credit to a viceroy. The
+      Rangar motioned King to get in first, and the moment they were both seated
+      the Rajput coachman set the horses to going like the wind. Rewa Gunga
+      opened a jeweled cigarette case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you have one?&rdquo; he asked with the air of royalty entertaining a
+      blood-equal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King accepted a cigarette for politeness' sake and took occasion to admire
+      the man's slender wrist, that was doubtless hard and strong as woven
+      steel, but was not much more than half the thickness of his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rajputs as a race are proud of their wrists and hands. Their swords
+      are made with a hilt so small that none save a Rajput of the blood could
+      possibly use one; yet there is no race in all warring India, nor any in
+      the world, that bears a finer record for hard fighting and sheer
+      derring-do. One of the questions that occurred to King that minute was why
+      this well-bred youngster whose age he guessed at twenty-two or so had not
+      turned his attention to the army.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My height!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man had read his thoughts!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not quite tall enough. Besides--you are a soldier, are you not? And
+      do you fight?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded toward a dozen water-buffaloes, that slouched along the street
+      with wet goatskin mussuks slung on their blue flanks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They can fight,&rdquo; he said smiling. &ldquo;So can any other fool!&rdquo; Then, after a
+      minute of rather strained silence: &ldquo;My message is from her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From Yasmini?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who else?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King accepted the rebuke with a little inclination of the head. He spoke
+      as little as possible, because he was puzzled. He had become conscious of
+      a puzzled look in the Rangar's eyes--of a subtle wonderment that
+      might be intentional flattery (for Art and the East are one). Whenever the
+      East is doubtful, and recognizes doubt, it is as dangerous as a hillside
+      in the rains, and it only added to his problem if the Rangar found in him
+      something inexplicable. The West can only get the better of the East when
+      the East is too cock-sure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has jolly well gone North!&rdquo; said the Rangar suddenly, and King shut
+      his teeth with a snap. He sat bolt upright, and the Rangar allowed himself
+      to look amused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When? Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She was too jolly well excited to wait, sahib! She is of the North, you
+      know. She loves the North, and the men of the 'Hills'; and she knows them
+      because she loves them. There came a tar (telegram) from Peshawur, from a
+      general, to say King sahib comes to Delhi; but already she had completed
+      all arrangements here. She was in a great stew, I can assure you. Finally
+      she said, 'Why should I wait?' Nobody could answer her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke English well enough. Few educated foreign gentlemen could have
+      spoken it better, although there was the tendency to use slang that
+      well-bred natives insist on picking up from British officers; and as he
+      went on, here and there the native idiom crept through, translated. King
+      said nothing, but listened and watched, puzzled more than he would have
+      cared to admit by the look in the Rangar's eyes. It was not suspicion--nor
+      respect. Yet there was a suggestion of both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At last she said, 'It is well; I will not wait! I know of this sahib. He
+      is a man whose feet stand under him and he will not tread my growing
+      flowers into garbage! He will be clever enough to pick up the end of the
+      thread that I shall leave behind and follow it and me! He is a true hound,
+      with a nose that reads the wind, or the general sahib never would have
+      sent him!' So she left me behind, sahib, to--to present to you the
+      end of the thread of which she spoke.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King tossed away the stump of the cigarette and rolled his tongue round
+      the butt of a fresh cheroot. The word &ldquo;hound&rdquo; is not necessarily a
+      compliment in any of a thousand Eastern tongues and gains little by
+      translation. It might have been a slip, but the East takes advantage of
+      its own slips as well as of other peoples' unless watched.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The carriage swayed at high speed round three sharp corners in succession
+      before the Rangar spoke again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has often heard of you,&rdquo; he said then. That was not unlikely, but not
+      necessarily true either. If it were true, it did not help to account for
+      the puzzled look in the Rangar's eyes, that increased rather than
+      diminished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've heard of her,&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course! Who has not? She has desired to meet you, sahib, ever since
+      she was told you are the best man in your service.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King grunted, thinking of the knife beneath his shirt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is very glad that you and she are on the same errand.&rdquo; He leaned
+      forward for the sake of emphasis and laid a finger on King's hand. It was
+      a delicate, dainty finger with an almond nail. &ldquo;She is very glad. She is
+      far more glad than you imagine, or than you would believe. King sahib, she
+      is all bucked up about it! Listen--her web is wide! Her agents are
+      here--there--everywhere, and she is obeyed as few kings have
+      ever been! Those agents shall all be held answerable for your life, sahib,--for
+      she has said so! They are one and all your bodyguard, from now forward!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King inclined his head politely, but the weight of the knife inside his
+      shirt did not encourage credulity. True, it might not be Yasmini's knife,
+      and the Rangar's emphatic assurance might not be an unintentional
+      admission that the man who had tried to use it was Yasmini's man. But when
+      a man has formed the habit of deduction, he deduces as he goes along, and
+      is prone to believe what his instinct tells him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again, it was as if the Rangar read a part of his thoughts, if not all of
+      them. It is not difficult to counter that trick, but to do it a man must
+      be on his guard, or the East will know what he has thought and what he is
+      going to think, as many have discovered when it was too late.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her men are able to protect anybody's life from any God's number of
+      assassins, whatever may lead you to think the contrary. From now forward
+      your life is in her men's keeping!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very good of her; I'm sure,&rdquo; King murmured. He was thinking of the
+      general's express order to apply for a &ldquo;passport&rdquo; that would take him into
+      Khinjan Caves--mentally cursing the necessity for asking any kind of
+      favor,--and wondering whether to ask this man for it or wait until he
+      should meet Yasmini. He had about made up his mind that to wait would be
+      quite within a strict interpretation of his orders, as well as infinitely
+      more agreeable to himself, when the Rangar answered his thoughts again as
+      if he had spoken them aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She left this with me, saying I am to give it to you! I am to say that
+      wherever you wear it, between here and Afghanistan, your life shall be
+      safe and you may come and go!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King stared. The Rangar drew a bracelet from an inner pocket and held it
+      out. It was a wonderful, barbaric thing of pure gold, big enough for a
+      grown man's wrist, and old enough to have been hammered out in the very
+      womb of time. It looked almost like ancient Greek, and it fastened with a
+      hinge and clasp that looked as if they did not belong to it, and might
+      have been made by a not very skillful modern jeweler.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won't you wear it?&rdquo; asked Rewa Gunga, watching him. &ldquo;It will prove a true
+      talisman! What was the name of the Johnny who had a lamp to rub? Aladdin?
+      It will be better than what he had! He could only command a lot of bogies.
+      This will give you authority over flesh and blood! Take it, sahib!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So King put it on, letting it slip up his sleeve, out of sight,--with
+      a sensation as the snap closed of putting handcuffs on himself. But the
+      Rangar looked relieved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is your passport, sahib! Show it to a Hill-man whenever you suppose
+      yourself in danger. The Raj might go to pieces, but while Yasmini lives--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her friends will boast about her, I suppose!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King finished the sentence for him because it is not considered good form for
+      natives to hint at possible dissolution of the Anglo-Indian Government.
+      Everybody knows that the British will not govern India forever, but the
+      British--who know it best of all, and work to that end most fervently--are
+      the only ones encouraged to talk about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a few minutes after that Rewa Gunga held his peace, while the carriage
+      swayed at breakneck speed through the swarming streets. They had to drive
+      slower in the Chandni Chowk, for the ancient Street of the Silversmiths
+      that is now the mart of Delhi was ablaze with crude colors, and was
+      thronged with more people than ever since '57. There were a thousand signs
+      worth studying by a man who could read them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King, watching and saying nothing, reached the conclusion that Delhi was
+      in hand--excited undoubtedly, more than a bit bewildered, watchful,
+      but in hand. Without exactly knowing how he did it, he grew aware of a
+      certain confidence that underlay the surface fuss. After that the sea of
+      changing patterns and raised voices ceased to have any particular interest
+      for him and he lay back against the cushions to pay stricter attention to
+      his own immediate affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not believe for a second the lame explanation Yasmini had left
+      behind. She must have some good reason for wishing to be first up the
+      Khyber, and he was very sorry indeed she had slipped away. It might be
+      only jealousy, yet why should she be jealous? It might be fear--yet
+      why should she be afraid?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the next remark of the Rangar's that set him entirely on his guard,
+      and thenceforward whoever could have read his thoughts would have been
+      more than human. Perhaps it is the most dominant characteristic of the
+      British race that it will not defend itself until it must. He had known of
+      that thought-reading trick ever since his ayah (native nurse) taught him
+      to lisp Hindustanee; just as surely he knew that its impudent, repeated
+      use was intended to sap his belief in himself. There is not much to choose
+      between the native impudence that dares intrude on a man's thoughts, and
+      the insolence that understands it, and is rather too proud to care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll bet you a hundred dibs,&rdquo; said the Rangar, &ldquo;that she jolly well
+      didn't fancy your being on the scene ahead of her! I'll bet you she
+      decided to be there first and get control of the situation! Take me? You'd
+      lose if you did! She's slippery, and quick, and like all Women, she's
+      jealous!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rangar's eyes were on his, but King was not to be caught again. It is
+      quite easy to think behind a fence, so to speak, if one gives attention to
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She will be busy presently fooling those Afridis,&rdquo; he continued, waving
+      his cigarette. &ldquo;She has fooled them always, to the limit of their bally
+      bent. They all believe she is their best friend in the world--oh,
+      dear Yes, you bet they do! And so she is--so she is--but not in
+      the way they think! They believe she plots with them against the Raj! Poor
+      silly devils! Yet Yasmini loves them! They want war--blood--loot!
+      It is all they think about! They are seldom satisfied unless their wrists
+      and elbows are bally well red with other peoples' gore! And while they are
+      picturing the loot, and the slaughter of unbelievers--(as if they
+      believed anything but foolishness themselves!)--Yasmini plays her own
+      game, for amusement and power--a good game--a deep game! You
+      have seen already how India has to ask her aid in the 'Hills'! She loves
+      power, power, power--not for its name, for names are nothing, but to
+      use it. She loves the feel of it! Fighting is not power! Blood-letting is
+      foolishness. If there is any blood spilt it is none of her doing--unless--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unless what?&rdquo; asked King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh--sometimes there were fools who interfered. You can not blame her
+      for that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You seem to be a champion of hers! How long have you known her?&rdquo;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rangar eyed him sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A long time. She and I played together when we were children. I know her
+      whole history--and that is something nobody else in the world knows
+      but she herself. You see, I am favored. It is because she knows me very
+      well that she chose me to travel North with you, when you start to find
+      her in the 'Hills'!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King cleared his throat, and the Rangar nodded, looking into his eyes with
+      the engaging confidence of a child who never has been refused anything, in
+      or out of reason. King made no effort to look pleased, so the Rangar drew
+      on his resources.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a letter from her,&rdquo; he stated blandly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From a pocket in the carriage cushions he brought out a silver tube,
+      richly carved in the Kashmiri style and closed at either end with a
+      tightly fitting silver cap. King accepted it and drew the cap from one
+      end. A roll of scented paper fell on his lap, and a puff of hot wind
+      combined with a lurch of the carriage springs came near to lose it for
+      him; he snatched it just in time and unrolled it to find a letter written
+      to himself in Urdu, in a beautiful flowing hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Urdu is perhaps the politest of written tongues and lends itself most
+      readily to indirectness; but since he did not expect to read a catalogue
+      of exact facts, he was not disappointed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Translated, the letter ran:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;To Athelstan King sahib, by the hand of Rewa Gunga.
+        Greeting.  The bearer is my well-trusted servant, whom
+        I have chosen to be the sahib's guide until Heaven
+        shall be propitious and we meet.  He is instructed
+        in all that he need know concerning what is now in hand,
+        and he will tell by word of mouth such things as ought
+        not to be written.  By all means let Rewa Gunga travel
+        with you, for he is of royal blood, of the House of
+        Ketchwaha and will not fail you.  His honor and mine
+        are one.  Praying that the many gods of India may heap
+        honors on your honor's head, providing each his proper
+        attribute toward entire ability to succeed in all things,
+        but especially in the present undertaking,
+
+        &ldquo;I am Your Excellency's humble servant,
+        --Yasmini.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      He had barely finished reading it when the coachman took a last corner at
+      a gallop and drew the horses up on their haunches at a door in a high
+      white wall. Rewa Gunga sprang out of the carriage before the horses were
+      quite at a standstill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here we are!&rdquo; he said, and King, gathering up the letter and the silver
+      tube, noticed that the street curved here so that no other door and no
+      window overlooked this one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He followed the Rangar, and he was no sooner into the shadow of the door
+      than the coachman lashed the horses and the carriage swung out of view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This way,&rdquo; said the Rangar over his shoulder. &ldquo;Come!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter III
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Lie to a liar, for lies are his coin.
+     Steal from a thief, for that is easy.
+     Set a trap for a trickster, and catch him at the first attempt.
+     But beware of the man who has no axe to grind.
+     --Eastern Proverb
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It was a musty smelling entrance, so dark that to see was scarcely
+      possible after the hot glare outside. Dimly King made out Rewa Gunga
+      mounting stairs to the left and followed him. The stairs wound backward
+      and forward on themselves four times, growing scarcely any lighter as they
+      ascended, until, when he guessed himself two stories at least above road
+      level, there was a sudden blaze of reflected light and he blinked at more
+      mirrors than he could count. They had been swung on hinges suddenly to
+      throw the light full in his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were curtains reflected in each mirror, and little glowing lamps, so
+      cunningly arranged that it was not possible to guess which were real and
+      which were not. Rewa Gunga offered no explanation, but stood watching with
+      quiet amusement. He seemed to expect King to take a chance and go forward,
+      but if he did he reckoned without his guest. King stood still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then suddenly, as if she had done it a thousand times before and surprised
+      a thousand people, a little nut-brown maid parted the middle pair of
+      curtains and said &ldquo;Salaam!&rdquo; smiling with teeth that were as white as
+      porcelain. All the other curtains parted too, so that the whereabouts of
+      the door might still have been in doubt had she not spoken and so
+      distinguished herself from her reflections. King looked scarcely
+      interested and not at all disturbed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Balked of his amusement, Rewa Gunga hurried past him, thrusting the little
+      maid aside, and led the way. King followed him into a long room, whose
+      walls were hung with richer silks than any he remembered to have seen. In
+      a great wide window to one side some twenty women began at once to make
+      flute music.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Silken punkahs swung from chains, wafting back and forth a cloud of
+      sandalwood smoke that veiled the whole scene in mysterious, scented mist.
+      Through the open window came the splash of a fountain and the chattering
+      of birds, and the branch of a feathery tree drooped near by. It seemed
+      that the long white wall below was that of Yasmini's garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be welcome!&rdquo; laughed Rewa Gunga; &ldquo;I am to do the honors, since she is not
+      here. Be seated, sahib.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King chose a divan at the room's farthest end, near tall curtains that led
+      into rooms beyond. He turned his back toward the reason for his choice. On
+      a little ivory-inlaid ebony table about ten feet away lay a knife, that
+      was almost the exact duplicate of the one inside his shirt. Bronze knives
+      of ancient date, with golden handles carved to represent a woman dancing,
+      are rare. The ability to seem not to notice incriminating evidence is
+      rarer still--rarest of all when under the eyes of a native of India,
+      for cats and hawks are dullards by comparison to them. But King saw the
+      knife, yet did not seem to see it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was nothing there calculated to set an Englishman at ease. In spite
+      of the Rangar's casual manner, Yasmini's reception room felt like the
+      antechamber to another world, where mystery is atmosphere and ordinary air
+      to breathe is not at all. He could sense hushed expectancy on every side--could
+      feel the eyes of many women fixed on him--and began to draw on his
+      guard as a fighting man draws on armor. There and then he deliberately set
+      himself to resist mesmerism, which is the East's chief weapon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rewa Gunga, perfectly at home, sprawled leisurely, along a cushioned couch
+      with a grace that the West has not learned yet; but King did not make the
+      mistake of trusting him any better for his easy manners, and his eyes
+      sought swiftly for some unrhythmic, unplanned thing on which to rest, that
+      he might save himself by a sort of mental leverage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glancing along the wall that faced the big window, he noticed for the
+      first time a huge Afridi, who sat on a stool and leaned back against the
+      silken hangings with arms folded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is that man?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He? Oh, he is a savage--just a big savage,&rdquo; said Rewa Gunga, looking
+      vaguely annoyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why is he here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not dare let go of this chance side-issue. He knew that Rewa Gunga
+      wished him to talk of Yasmini and to ask questions about her, and that if
+      he succumbed to that temptation all his self-control would be cunningly
+      sapped away from him until his secrets, and his very senses, belonged to
+      some one else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is he doing here?&rdquo; he insisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He? Oh, he does nothing. He waits,&rdquo; purred the Rangar. &ldquo;He is to be your
+      body-servant on your journey to the North. He is nothing--nobody at
+      all!--except that he is to be trusted utterly because he loves
+      Yasmini. He is Obedience! A big obedient fool! Let him be!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;If he's to be my man I'll speak to him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt himself winning. Already the spell of the room was lifting, and he
+      no longer felt the cloud of sandalwood smoke like a veil across his brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won't you tell him to come here to me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rewa Gunga laughed, resting his silk turban against the wall hangings and
+      clasping both hands about his knee. It was as a man might laugh who has
+      been touched in a bout with foils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!--Ismail!&rdquo; he called, with a voice like a bell, that made King
+      stare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Afridi seemed to come out of a deep sleep and looked bewildered,
+      rubbing his eyes and feeling whether his turban was on straight. He combed
+      his beard with nervous fingers as he gazed about him and caught Rewa
+      Gunga's eye. Then he sprang to his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; ordered Rewa Gunga.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man obeyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you see?&rdquo; Rewa Gunga chuckled. &ldquo;He rose from his place like a
+      buffalo, rump first and then shoulder after shoulder! Such men are safe!
+      Such men have no guile beyond what will help them to obey! Such men think
+      too slowly to invent deceit for its own sake!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Afridi came and towered above them, standing with gnarled hands
+      knotted into clubs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is thy name?&rdquo; King asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ismail!&rdquo; he boomed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou art to be my servant?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye! So said she. I am her man. I obey!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When did she say so?&rdquo; King asked him blandly, asking unexpected questions
+      being half the art of Secret Service, although the other half is harder to
+      achieve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Hillman stroked his great beard and stood considering the question.
+      One could almost imagine the click of slow machinery revolving in his
+      mind, although King entertained a shrewd suspicion that he was not so
+      stupid as he chose to seem. His eyes were too hawk-bright to be a stupid
+      man's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before she went away,&rdquo; he answered at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When did she go away?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought again, then &ldquo;Yesterday,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did you wait before you answered?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Afridi's eyes furtively sought Rewa Gunga's and found no aid there.
+      Watching the Rangar less furtively, but even less obviously, King was
+      aware that his eyes were nearly closed, as if they were not interested.
+      The fingers that clasped his knee drummed on it indifferently, seeing
+      which King allowed himself to smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never mind,&rdquo; he told Ismail. &ldquo;It is no matter. It is ever well to think
+      twice before speaking once, for thus mistakes die stillborn. Only the
+      monkey-folk thrive on quick answers--is it not so? Thou art a man of
+      many inches--of thew and sinew--Hey, but thou art a man! If the
+      heart within those great ribs of thine is true as thine arms are strong I
+      shall be fortunate to have thee for a servant!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo; said the Afridi. &ldquo;But what are words? She has said I am thy
+      servant, and to hear her is to obey!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then from now thou art my servant?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, but from yesterday when she gave the order!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye, good for thee! May Allah do more to me if I fail!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, take me a telegram!&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to write at once on a half-sheet of paper that he tore from a
+      letter he had in his pocket, setting down a row of figures at the top and
+      transposing into cypher as he went along.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yasmini has gone North. Is there any reason at your end why I should not
+      follow her at once?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He addressed it in plain English to his friend the general at Peshawur,
+      taking great care lest the Rangar read it through those sleepy,
+      half-closed eyes of his. Then he tore the cypher from the top, struck a
+      match and burned the strip of paper and handed the code telegram to
+      Ismail, directing him carefully to a government office where the cypher
+      signature would be recognized and the telegram given precedence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail stalked off with it, striding like Moses down from Sinai--hook-nose--hawk-eye--flowing
+      beard--dignity and all, and King settled down to guard himself
+      against the next attempt on his sovereign self-command.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now he chose to notice the knife on the ebony table as if he had not seen
+      it before. He got up and reached for it and brought it back, turning it
+      over and over in his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A strange knife,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,--from Khinjan,&rdquo; said Rewa Gunga, and King eyed him as one wolf
+      eyes another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What makes you say it is from Khinjan?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She brought it from Khinjan Caves herself! There is another knife that
+      matches it, but that is not here. That bracelet you now wear, sahib, is
+      from Khinjan Caves too! She has the secret of the Caves!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have heard that the 'Heart of the Hills' is there,&rdquo; King answered. &ldquo;Is
+      the 'Heart of the Hills' a treasure house?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rewa Gunga laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ask her, sahib! Perhaps she will tell you! Perhaps she will let you see!
+      Who knows? She is a woman of resource and unexpectedness--Let her
+      women dance for you a while.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King nodded. Then he got up and laid the knife back on the little table. A
+      minute or so later he noticed that at a sign from Rewa Gunga a woman left
+      the great window place and spirited the knife away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I have a sheet of paper?&rdquo; he asked, for he knew that another fight
+      for his self-command was due.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rewa Gunga gave an order, and a maid brought him scented paper on a silver
+      tray. He drew out his own fountain pen then and made ready.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In spite of the great silken punkah that swung rhythmically across the
+      full breadth of the room the beat was so great that the pen slipped round
+      and round between his fingers. Yet he contrived to write, and since his
+      one object was to give his brain employment, he wrote down a list of the
+      names he had memorized in the train on the journey from Peshawur, not
+      thinking of a use for the list until he had finished. Then, though, a real
+      use occurred to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While he began to write more than a dozen dancing women swept into the
+      room from behind the silk hangings in a concerted movement that was all
+      lithe slumberous grace. Wood-wind music called to them from the great deep
+      window as snakes are summoned from their holes, and as cobras answer the
+      charmer's call the women glided to the center and stood poised beneath the
+      punkah.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There they began to chant, still dreamily, and with the chant the dance
+      began, in and out, round and round, lazily, ever so lazily, wreathed in
+      buoyant gossamer that was scarcely more solid than the sandalwood smoke
+      they wafted into rings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King watched them and listened to their chant until he began to recognize
+      the strain on the eye-muscles that precedes the mesmeric spell. Then he
+      wrote and read what he had written and wrote again. And after that, for
+      the sake of mental exercise, he switched his thoughts into another channel
+      altogether. He reverted to Delhi railway station.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Turks can spy as well as anybody.--They know those men are going
+      to Kerachi to be ready for them.--Therefore, having cut his eye-teeth
+      B.C. several hundred, the Unspeakable Turk will take care not to misbehave
+      UNTIL he's ready. And I suppose our government, being ours and we being
+      us, will let him do it! All of which will take time.--And that again
+      means no trouble in the Hills--probably--until the Turks really
+      do feel ready to begin. They'll preach a holy war just ahead of the date.
+      The tribes will keep quiet because an army at Kerachi might be meant for
+      their benefit. Oh, yes, I'm quite sure they were entraining for Kerachi in
+      readiness to move on Basra.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Trucks ready for camels--and camel drivers--and food for camels--and
+      Eresby, who's just come from taking a special camel course. Not a doubt of
+      it!--And then, Corrigan--Elwright--Doby--Gould--all
+      on the platform in a bunch, and all down on the Army List as Turkish
+      interpreters! Not a doubt left!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have you written?&rdquo; asked a quiet voice at his ear; and he turned to
+      look straight in the eyes of Rewa Gunga, who had leaned forward to read
+      over his shoulder. Just for one second he hovered on the brink of quick
+      defeat. Having escaped the Scylla of the dancing women, Charybdis waited
+      for him in the shape of eyes that were pools of hot mystery. It was the
+      sound of his own voice that brought him back to the world again and saved
+      his will for him unbound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Read it, won't you?&rdquo; he laughed. &ldquo;If you know, take this pen and mark the
+      names of whichever of those men are still in Delhi.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rewa Gunga took pen and paper and set a mark against some thirty of the
+      names, for King had a manner that disarmed refusal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where are the others?&rdquo; he asked him, after a glance at it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In jail, or else over the border.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Already?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rangar nodded. &ldquo;Trust Yasmini! She saw to that jolly well before she
+      left Delhi! She would have stayed had there been anything more to do!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King began to watch the dance again, for it did not feel safe to look too
+      long into the Rangar's eyes. It was not wise just then to look too long at
+      anything, or to think too long on any one subject.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ismail is slow about returning,&rdquo; said the Rangar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wrote at the foot of the tar,&rdquo; said King, &ldquo;that they are to detain him
+      there until the answer comes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rangar's eyes blazed for a second and then grew cold again (as King
+      did not fail to observe). He knew as well as the Rangar that not many men
+      would have kept their will so unfettered in that room as to be able to
+      give independent orders. He recognized resignation, temporary at least, in
+      the Rangar's attitude of leaning back again to watch from under lowered
+      eyelids. It was like being watched by a cat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this while the women danced on, in time to wailing flute-music, until,
+      it seemed from nowhere, a lovelier woman than any of them appeared in
+      their midst, sitting cross-legged with a flat basket at her knees. She sat
+      with arms raised and swayed from the waist as if in a delirium. Her arms
+      moved in narrowing circles, higher and higher above the basket lid, and
+      the lid began to rise. Nobody touched it, nor was there any string, but as
+      it rose it swayed with sickening monotony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was minutes before the bodies of two great king-cobras could be made
+      out, moving against the woman's spangled dress. The basket lid was resting
+      on their heads, and as the music and the chanting rose to a wild weird
+      shriek the lid rose too, until suddenly the woman snatched the lid away
+      and the snakes were revealed, with hoods raised, hissing the cobra's
+      hate-song that is prelude to the poison-death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They struck at the woman, one after the other, and she leaped out of their
+      range, swift and as supple as they. Instantly then she joined in the
+      dance, with the snakes striking right and left at her. Left and right she
+      swayed to avoid them, far more gracefully than a matador avoids the bull
+      and courting a deadlier peril than he--poisonous, two to his one. As
+      she danced she whirled both arms above her head and cried as the
+      were-wolves are said to do on stormy nights.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some unseen hand drew a blind over the great window and an eerie
+      green-and-golden light began to play from one end of the room, throwing
+      the dancers into half-relief and deepening the mystery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sweet strange scents were wafted in from under the silken hangings. The
+      room grew cooler by unguessed means. Every sense was treacherously wooed.
+      And ever, in the middle of the moving light among the languorous dancers,
+      the snakes pursued the woman!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you do this often?&rdquo; wondered King, in a calm aside to Rewa Gunga,
+      turning half toward him and taking his eyes off the dance without any
+      very great effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rewa Gunga clapped his hands and the dance ceased. The woman spirited her
+      snakes away. The blind was drawn upward and in a moment all was normal
+      again with the punkah swinging slowly overhead, except that the seductive
+      smell remained, that was like the early-morning breath of all the
+      different flowers of India.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If she were here,&rdquo; said the Rangar, a little grimly--with a trace of
+      disappointment in his tone--&ldquo;you would not snatch your eyes away like
+      that! You would have been jolly well transfixed, my friend! These--she--that
+      woman--they are but clumsy amateurs! If she were here, to dance with
+      her snakes for you, you would have been jolly well dancing with her, if
+      she had wished it! Perhaps you shall see her dance some day! Ah,--here
+      is Ismail,&rdquo; he added in an altered tone of voice. He seemed relieved at
+      sight of the Afridi.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bursting through the glass-bead curtains at the door, the great savage
+      strode down the room, holding out a telegram. Rewa Gunga looked as if he
+      would have snatched it, but King's hand was held out first and Ismail gave
+      it to him. With a murmur of conventional apology King tore the envelope
+      and in a second his eyes were ablaze with something more than wonder. A
+      mystery, added to a mystery, stirred all the zeal in him. But in a second
+      he had sweated his excitement down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Read that, will you?&rdquo; he said, passing it to Rewa Gunga. It was not in
+      cypher, but in plain everyday English.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has not gone North,&rdquo; it ran. &ldquo;She is still in Delhi. Suit your own
+      movements to your plans.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can you explain?&rdquo; asked King in a level voice. He was watching the Rangar
+      narrowly, yet he could not detect the slightest symptom of emotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Explain?&rdquo; said the Rangar. &ldquo;Who can explain foolishness? It means that
+      another fat general has made another fat mistake!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What makes you so certain she went North?&rdquo; King asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Instead of answering, Rewa Gunga beckoned Ismail, who had stepped back out
+      of hearing. The giant came and loomed over them like the Spirit of the
+      Lamp of the Arabian Nights.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whither went she?&rdquo; asked the Rangar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To the North!&rdquo; he boomed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How knowest thou?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw her go!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When went she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yesterday, when a telegram came.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The word &ldquo;came&rdquo; was the only clue to his meaning, for in the language he
+      used &ldquo;yesterday&rdquo; and &ldquo;to-morrow&rdquo; are the same word; such is the East's
+      estimate of time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By what route did she go?&rdquo; asked Rewa Gunga.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By the terrain from the station.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How knowest thou that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was there, bearing her box of jewels.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Didst thou see her buy the tikkut?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, I bought it, for she ordered me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For what destination was the tikkut?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peshawur!&rdquo; said Ismail, filling his mouth with the word as if he loved
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet&rdquo;--it was King who spoke now, pointing an accusing finger at him--&ldquo;a
+      burra sahib sends a tar to me--this is it!--to say she is in
+      Delhi still! Who told thee to answer those questions with those words?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She!&rdquo; the big man answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yasmini?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye! May Allah cover her with blessings!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;You have my leave to depart out of earshot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he turned on Rewa Gunga.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whatever the truth of all this,&rdquo; he said quietly, &ldquo;I suppose it means she
+      has done what there was to do in Delhi?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sahib,--trust her! Does a tigress hunt where no watercourses are,
+      and where no game goes to drink? She follows the sambur!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are positive she has started for the North?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sahib, when she speaks it is best to believe! She told me she will go.
+      Therefore I am ready to lead King sahib up the Khyber to her!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you certain you can find her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye, sahib,--in the dark!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's a train leaves for the North to-night,&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rangar nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll want a pass up the line. How many servants? Three--four--how
+      many?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One,&rdquo; said the Rangar, and King was instantly suspicious of the modesty
+      of that allowance; however he wrote out a pass for Rewa Gunga and one
+      servant and gave it to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be there on time and see about your own reservation,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I'll
+      attend to Ismail's pass myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He folded the list of names that the Rangar had marked and wrote something
+      on the back. Then he begged an envelope, and Rewa Gunga had one brought to
+      him. He sealed the list in the envelope, addressed it and beckoned Ismail
+      again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take this to Saunders sahib!&rdquo; he ordered. &ldquo;Go first to the telegraph
+      office, where you were before, and the babu there will tell you where
+      Saunders sahib may be found. Having found him, deliver the letter to him.
+      Then come and find me at the Star of India Hotel and help me to bathe and
+      change my clothes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To hear is to obey!&rdquo; boomed Ismail, bowing; but his last glance was for
+      Rewa Gunga, and he did not turn to go until he had met the Rangar's eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Ismail had gone striding down the room, with no glance to spare for
+      the whispering women in the window, and with dignity like an aura exuding
+      from him, King looked into the Rangar's eyes with that engaging frankness
+      of his that disarms so many people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you'll be on the train to-night?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To hear is to obey! With pleasure, sahib!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then good-by until this evening.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King bowed very civilly and walked out, rather unsteadily because his head
+      ached. Probably nobody else, except the Rangar, could have guessed what an
+      ordeal he had passed through or how near he had been to losing
+      self-command.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But as he felt his way down the stairs, that were dimly lighted now, he
+      knew he had all his senses with him, for he &ldquo;spotted&rdquo; and admired the
+      lurking places that had been designed for undoing of the unwary, or even
+      the overwary. Yasmini's Delhi nest was like a hundred traps in one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Almost like a pool table,&rdquo; he reflected. &ldquo;Pocket 'em at both ends and the
+      middle!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the street he found a gharry after a while and drove to his hotel. And
+      before Ismail came he took a stroll through a bazaar, where he made a few
+      strange purchases. In the hotel lobby he invested in a leather bag with a
+      good lock, in which to put them. Later on Ismail came and proved himself
+      an efficient body-servant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That evening Ismail carried the leather bag and found his place on the
+      train, and that was not so difficult, because the trains running North
+      were nearly empty, although the platforms were all crowded. As he stood at
+      the carriage door with Ismail near him, a man named Saunders slipped
+      through the crowd and sought him out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Arrested 'em all!&rdquo; he grinned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Seen anything of her? I recognized Yasmini's scent on your envelope. It's
+      peculiar to her--one of her monopolies!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. I'm told she went North yesterday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not by train, she didn't! It's my business to know that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King did not answer; nor did he look surprised. He was watching Rewa
+      Gunga, followed by a servant, hurrying to a reserved compartment at the
+      front end of the train. The Rangar waved to him and he waved back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd know her in a million!&rdquo; vowed Saunders. &ldquo;I can take oath she hasn't
+      gone anywhere by train! Unless she has walked, or taken a carriage, she's
+      in Delhi!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The engine gave a preliminary shriek and the giant Ismail nudged King's
+      elbow in impatient warning. There was no more sign of Rewa Gunga, who had
+      evidently settled down in his compartment for the night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get my bag out again!&rdquo; King ordered, and Ismail stared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get out my bag, I said!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To hear is to obey!&rdquo; Ismail grumbled, reaching with his long arm through
+      the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The engine shrieked again, somebody whistled, and the train began to move.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+&ldquo;You've missed it!&rdquo; said Saunders, amused at Ismail's frantic
+disappointment. The giant was tugging at his beard. &ldquo;How about your
+trunk? Better wire ahead and have it spotted for you.&rdquo;
+
+        &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said King;  &ldquo;it's still in the baggage
+room at the
+other station. I didn't intend to go by this train. Came down here
+to see another fellow off, that's all! Have a cigar and then let's go
+together and look those prisoners over!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter IV
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   Men boast in the Hills, when they ought to pray;
+   For the wind blows lusty, and the blood runs red,
+   And Law lies belly upwards for a man to wreak his fancy on it.
+   Down in the plains, in the dust of the plains
+   Where law is master and a good man ought to boast,
+   They all lie belly downwards praying for their Hills again!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The rear lights of the train he had not taken swayed out of Delhi station
+      and King grinned as he wiped the sweat from his face with a dripping
+      handkerchief. Behind him towered the hook-nosed Ismail, resentful of the
+      unexpected. In front of him Saunders eyed the proffered black cheroots
+      suspiciously, accepted one with an air of curiosity and passed the case
+      back. Around them the clatter of the station crowd began to die, and
+      Parsimony in a shabby uniform went round to lower lights.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you sure--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King's merry eyes looked into Saunders' as if there were no world war
+      really and they two were puppets in a comedy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;--are you absolutely certain Yasmini is in Delhi?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Saunders. &ldquo;What I swear to is that she has not left by train.
+      It's my business to know who leaves by train.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What can you suggest?&rdquo; asked King, twisting at his scrubby little
+      mustache. But if he wished to convey the impression of a man at his wits'
+      end, he failed signally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I? Nothing! She's the most elusive individual in Asia! One person in the
+      world knows where she is, unless she has an accomplice. My information's
+      negative. I know she has not gone by--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King struck a match and held it out, so the sentence was unfinished; the
+      first few puffs of the astonishing cigar wiped out all memory of the
+      missing word. And then King changed the subject.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Those men I asked you to arrest--?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nabbed&rdquo;--puff--&ldquo;every one of 'em!&rdquo;--puff--puff--&ldquo;all
+      under&rdquo;--puff--puff--&ldquo;lock and key,--best smoke I ever
+      tasted--where d'you get 'em?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Had they been in communication with her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Puff--puff--&ldquo;You bet they had! Where d'you get these things?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not her special men by any chance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Puff--&ldquo;Gad, what smoke!--couldn't say, of course, but&rdquo;--puff--puff--&ldquo;shouldn't
+      think so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well--I'll go along with you if you like, and look them over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Both tone and manner gave Saunders credit for the suggestion, and Saunders
+      seemed to like it. There is nothing like following up, in football, war or
+      courtship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see you're a judge of a cigar,&rdquo; said King, and Saunders purred, all men
+      being fools to some extent, and the only trouble being to demonstrate the
+      fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had started for the station entrance when a nasal voice began
+      intoning, &ldquo;Cap-teen King sahib--Cap-teen King sahib!&rdquo; and a telegraph
+      messenger passed them with his book under his arm. King whistled him. A
+      moment later he was tearing open an official urgent telegram and writing a
+      string of figures in pencil across the top. Then he decoded swiftly,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;Advices are Yasmini was in Delhi as recently as six
+        this evening.  Fail to understand your inability to
+        get in touch.  Have you tried at her house?  Matters
+        in Khyber district much less satisfactory.  Word from
+        O-C Khyber Rifles to effect that lashkar is collecting.
+        Better sweep up in Delhi and proceed northward as quickly
+        as compatible with caution.   L. M. L.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The three letters at the end were the general's coded signature. The
+      wording of the telegram was such that as he read King saw a mental picture
+      of the general's bald red skull and could almost hear him say the &ldquo;fail to
+      understand.&rdquo; The three words &ldquo;much less satisfactory&rdquo; were a bookful of
+      information. So, as he folded up the telegram, tore the penciled strip of
+      figures from the top and burned it with a match, he was at pains to look
+      pleased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good news?&rdquo; asked Saunders, blowing smoke through his nose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Excellent. Where's my man? Here--you--Ismail!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The giant came and towered above him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You swore she went North!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha, sahib! To Peshawur she went!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did she start from this station?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From where else, sahib?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But this was too much for Saunders, who stepped forward and thrust in an
+      oar. King on the other hand stepped back a pace so as to watch both faces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, when did she go?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw her go!&rdquo; said Ismail, affronted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When? When, confound you! When?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yesterday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I expect he means to-morrow,&rdquo; said King. With the advantage of looker-on
+      and a very deep experience of Northerners, he had noted that Ismail was
+      lying and that Saunders was growing doubtful, although both men concealed
+      the truth with what was very close to being art.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a telegram here,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that says she is in Delhi!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He patted his coat, where the inner pocket bulged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, then the tar lies, for I saw her go with these two eyes of mine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not wise to lie to me, my friend,&rdquo; King assured him, so pleasantly
+      that none could doubt he was telling truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I lie may I eat dirt!&rdquo; Ismail answered him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inches lent the Afridi dignity, but dignity has often been used as a
+      stalking horse for untruth. King nodded, and it was not possible to judge
+      by his expression whether he believed or not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let's make a move,&rdquo; he said, turning to Saunders. &ldquo;She seems at any rate
+      to wish it believed she has gone North. I can't stay here indefinitely. If
+      she's here she's on the watch here, and there's no need of me. If she has
+      gone North, then that is where the kites are wheeling! I'll take the early
+      morning train. Where are the prisoners?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the old Mir Khan Palace. We were short of jail room and had to
+      improvise. The horse-stalls there have come in handy more than once
+      before. Shall we take this gharry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With Ismail up beside the driver nursing King's bag and looking like a
+      great grim vulture about to eat the horse, they drove back through
+      swarming streets in the direction of the river. King seemed to have lost
+      all interest in crowds. He scarcely even troubled to watch when they were
+      held up at a cross-roads by a marching regiment that tramped as if it were
+      herald of the Last Trump, with bayonets glistening in the street lights.
+      He sat staring ahead in silence, although Saunders made more than one
+      effort to engage him in conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo; he said at last suddenly--so that Saunders jumped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No need to stay here. I've got what I came for!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was that?&rdquo; asked Saunders, but King was silent again. Conscious of
+      the unaccustomed weight on his left wrist, he moved his arm so that the
+      sleeve drew and he could see the edge of the great gold bracelet Rewa
+      Gunga had given him in Yasmini's name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Know anything of Rewa Gunga?&rdquo; he asked suddenly again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Rangar?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, the Rangar. Yasmini's man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not much. I've seen him. I've spoken with him, and I've had to stand
+      impudence from him--twice. I've been tipped off more than once to let
+      him alone because he's her man. He does ticklish errands for her, or so
+      they say. He's what you might call 'known to the police' all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They began to approach an age-old palace near the river, and Saunders
+      whispered a pass-word when an armed guard halted them. They were halted
+      again at a gloomy gateway where an officer came out to look them over; by
+      his leave they left the gharry and followed him under the arch until their
+      heels rang on stone paving in a big ill-lighted courtyard surrounded by
+      high walls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There, after a little talk, they left Ismail squatting beside King's bag,
+      and Saunders led the way through a modern iron door, into what had once
+      been a royal prince's stables.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In gloom that was only thrown into contrast by a wide-spaced row of
+      electric lights, a long line of barred and locked converted horse-stalls
+      ran down one side of a lean-to building. The upper half of each locked
+      door was a grating of steel rods, so that there was some ventilation for
+      the prisoners; but very little light filtered between the bars, and all
+      that King could see of the men within was the whites of their eyes. And
+      they did not look friendly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had to pass between them and the light, and they could see more of him
+      than he could of them. At the first cell he raised his left hand and made
+      the gold bracelet on his wrist clink against the steel bars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A moment later be cursed himself, and felt the bracelet with his
+      fingernail. He had made a deep nick in the soft gold. A second later yet
+      he smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May God be with thee!&rdquo; boomed a prisoner's voice in Pashtu.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Didn't know that fellow was handcuffed,&rdquo; said Saunders. &ldquo;Did you hear the
+      ring? They should have been taken off. Leaving his irons on has made him
+      polite, though.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He passed on, and King followed him, saying nothing. But at the next cell
+      he repeated what he had done at the first, taking better care of the gold
+      but letting his wrist stay longer in the light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May God be with thee!&rdquo; said a voice within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gettin' a shade less arrogant, what?&rdquo; said Saunders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May God be with thee!&rdquo; said a man in the third stall as King passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They seem to be anxious for your morals!&rdquo; laughed Saunders, keeping a
+      pace or two ahead to do the honors of the place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May God be with thee!&rdquo; said a fourth man, and King desisted for the
+      present, because Saunders looked as if he were growing inquisitive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where did you arrest them?&rdquo; he asked when Saunders came to a stand under
+      a light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All in one place. At Ali's.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who and what is Ali?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pimp--crimp--procurer--Prussian spy and any other evil
+      thing that takes his fancy! Runs a combination gambling hell and boarding
+      house. Lets 'em run into debt and blackmails 'em. Ali's in the kaiser's
+      pay--that's known! 'Musing thing about it is he keeps a photo of
+      Wilhelm in his pocket and tries to make himself believe the kaiser knows
+      him by name. Suffers from swelled head, which is part of their plan, of
+      course. We'll get him when we want him, but at present he's useful 'as is'
+      for a decoy. Ali was very much upset at the arrest--asked in the name
+      of Heaven--seems to be familiar with God, too, and all the angels!--how
+      he shall collect all the money these men owe him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You wouldn't call these men prosperous, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not exactly! Ali is the only spy out of the North who prospers much at
+      present, and even he gets most of his money out of his private business.
+      Why, man, the real Germans we have pounced on are all as poor as church
+      mice. That's another part of the plan, of course, which is sweet in all
+      its workings. They're paid less than driven by threats of exposure to us--comes
+      cheaper, and serves to ginger up the spies! The Germans pay Ali a little,
+      and he traps the Hillmen when they come South--lets 'em gamble--gets
+      'em into debt--plays on their fear of jail and their ignorance of the
+      Indian Penal Code, which altereth every afternoon--and spends a lot
+      of time telling 'em stories to take back with 'em to the Hills when they
+      can get away. They can get away when they've paid him what they owe. He
+      makes that clear, and of course that's the fly in the amber. Yasmini sends
+      and pays their board and gambling debts, and she's our man, so to speak.
+      When they get back to the 'Hills'--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks,&rdquo; said King, &ldquo;I know what happens in the 'Hills. Tell me about the
+      Delhi end of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, when the wander-fever grabs 'em again they come down once more from
+      their 'Hills' to drink and gamble,--and first they go to Yasmini's.
+      But she won't let 'em drink at her place. Have to give her credit for
+      that, y'know; her place has never been a stews. Sooner or later they grow
+      tired of virtue, 'specially with so much intrigue goin' on under their
+      noses, and back they all drift to Ali's and tell him tales to tell the
+      Germans--and the round begins again. Yasmini coaxes all their stories
+      out of 'em and primes 'em with a few extra good ones into the bargain.
+      Everybody's fooled--'specially the Germans--and exceptin', of
+      course, Yasmini and the Raj. Nobody ever fooled that woman, nor ever will
+      if my belief goes for anything!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sounds simple!&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Simple and sordid!&rdquo; agreed Saunders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King looked up and down the line of locked doors and then straight into
+      Saunders' eyes in a friendly, yet rather disconcerting way. One could not
+      judge whether he were laughing or just thinking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;D'you suppose it's as simple as all that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How d'you mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;D'you suppose the Germans aren't in direct touch with the tribes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should they be? The simpler the better, I expect, from their point of
+      view; and the cheaper the better, too!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Um-m-m!&rdquo; King rubbed his chin. &ldquo;On what charge did you get these men?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Defense of the Realm--suspicious characters--charge to be
+      entered later.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good! That's simple at all events! Know anything of my man Ismail?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sure! He's one of Yasmini's pets. She bailed him out of Ali's three years
+      ago and he worships her. It was he who broke the leg and ribs of a
+      pup-rajah a month or two ago for putting on too much dog in her reception
+      room! He's Ursus out of Quo Vadis! He's dog, desperado, stalking horse and
+      Keeper of the Queen's secrets!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why d'you suppose she passed him along to me?&rdquo; asked King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dunno! This is your little mystery, not mine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Glad you appreciate that! Do me a favor, will you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anything in reason.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get the keys to all these cells--send 'em in here to me by Ismail--and
+      leave me in here alone!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Saunders whistled and wiped sweat from his glistening face, for in spite
+      of windows open to the courtyard it was hotter than a furnace room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mayn't I have you thrown into a den of tigers?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;Or a nest of
+      cobras? Or get the fiery furnace ready? You'll find 'em sore--and
+      dangerous! That man at the end with handcuffs on has probably been
+      violent! That 'God be with thee' stuff is habit--they say it with
+      unction before they knife a man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll be careful, then,&rdquo; King chuckled; and it is a fact that few men can
+      argue with him when he laughs quietly in that way. &ldquo;Send me in the keys,
+      like a good chap.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So Saunders went, glad enough to get into the outer air. He slammed the
+      great iron door behind him as if he were glad, too, to disassociate
+      himself from King and all foolishness. Like many another first-class man,
+      King sheds friends as a cat sheds fur going under a gate. They grow again
+      and quit again and don't seem to make much difference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The instant the door slammed King continued down the line with his left
+      wrist held high so that the occupant of each cell in turn could see the
+      bracelet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May God be with thee!&rdquo; came the instant greeting from each cell until
+      down toward the farther end. The occupants of the last six cells were
+      silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Numbers had been chalked roughly on the doors. With wetted fingers he
+      rubbed out the chalk marks on the last six doors, and he had scarcely
+      finished doing that when Ismail strode in, slamming the great iron door
+      behind him, jangling a bunch of keys and looking more than ever like
+      somebody out of the Old Testament.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Open every door except those whose numbers I have rubbed out!&rdquo; King
+      ordered him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail proceeded to obey as if that were the least improbable order in all
+      the world. It took him two minutes to select the pass-key and determine
+      how it worked, then the doors flew open one after another in quick
+      succession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come out!&rdquo; he growled. &ldquo;Come out!--Come out!&rdquo; although King had not
+      ordered that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King went and stood under the center light with his left arm bared. The
+      prisoners, emerging like dead men out of tombs, blinked at the bright
+      light--saw him--then the bracelet--and saluted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May God be with thee!&rdquo; growled each of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They stood still then, awaiting fresh developments. It did not seem to
+      occur to any one of them as strange that a British officer in khaki
+      uniform should be sporting Yasmini's talisman; the thing was apparently
+      sufficient explanation in itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ye all know this?&rdquo; he asked, holding up his wrist. &ldquo;Whose is this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hers!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The answer was monosyllabic and instant from all thirty throats. &ldquo;May
+      Allah guard her, sleeping and awake!&rdquo; added one or two of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King lit a cheroot and made mental note of the wisdom of referring to her
+      by pronoun, not by name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I? Who am I?&rdquo; he asked, since it saves worlds of trouble to have the
+      other side state the case. The Secret Service was not designed for giving
+      information, but discovering it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her messenger! Who else? Thou art he who shall take us to the 'Hills'!
+      She promised!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did she know ye were in this jail?&rdquo; he asked them, and one of the
+      Hillmen laughed like a jackal, showing yellow eye-teeth. The others
+      cackled in chorus after him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Answer that riddle thyself--or else ask her! Who are we? Bats, that
+      can see in the night? Spirits, who can hear through walls? Nay, we be
+      plain men of the mountains!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But where were ye when she promised?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At Ali's. All of us at Ali's--held for debt. We sent and begged of
+      her. She sent word back by a woman that one of the sirkar's men shall free
+      us and send us home. So we waited, eating shame and little else, at Ali's.
+      At last came a sahib in a great rage, who ordered irons put on our wrists
+      and us marched hither. Only when each was pushed into a separate cell were
+      the irons taken off again. Yet we were patient, for we knew this is part
+      of her cunning, to get us away from Ali without paying him. 'May Ali die
+      of want,' said we, with one voice all together in these cells! And now we
+      be ready! They fed us before we had been in here an hour. Our bellies be
+      full, but we be hungry for the 'Hills'!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King thought of the gold-hilted knife, that still rested under his shirt.
+      He was tempted to show it to them and find out surely whose it was and
+      what it meant. But wisdom and curiosity seldom mingle. He thought of
+      Ismail--&ldquo;Ursus, of Quo Vadis--dog, desperado, stalking-horse and
+      Keeper of the Queen's secrets.&rdquo; It was not time yet to run risks with
+      Ismail. The knife stayed where it was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall start for the Hills at dawn,&rdquo; he said slowly, and he watched
+      their eyes gleam at the news. No caged tiger is as wretched as a prisoned
+      Hillman. No freed bird wings more wildly for the open. No moth comes more
+      foolishly back to the flame again. It was easy to take pity on them--probably
+      not one of whom knew pity's meaning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there any among you who would care to come--?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah-h-h-h!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;--at the price of strict obedience?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh-h-h-h-h!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed there was no word in Pashtu that could express their
+      willingness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We be very, very weary for our Hills!&rdquo; explained the nearest man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo; King answered. &ldquo;And ye all owe Ali!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Uh-h-h-h-h!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he knew better than to browbeat them on that account just then, for
+      the men of the North are easier led than driven--up to a certain
+      point. Yet it is no bad plan to remind them of the fundamentals to begin
+      with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will ye obey me, and him?&rdquo; he asked, laying his hand on Ismail's
+      shoulder, as much to let them see the bracelet again as for any other
+      reason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye! If we fail, Allah do more to us!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King laughed. &ldquo;Ye shall leave this place as my prisoners. Here ye have no
+      friends. Here ye must obey. But what when ye come to your 'Hills' at last?
+      Can one man hold thirty men prisoners then? In the 'Hills' will ye still
+      obey me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They answered him in chorus. Every man of the thirty, and Ismail into the
+      bargain, threw his right hand in the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Allah witness that we will obey!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah-h-h!&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;I have heard Hillmen swear by Allah many a time!
+      Many a time!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The answer to that was unexpected. Ismail knelt--seized his hand--and
+      pressed the gold bracelet to his lips!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In turn, every one of them filed by, knelt reverently and kissed the
+      bracelet!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Saw ye ever a Hillman do that before?&rdquo; asked Ismail. &ldquo;They will obey
+      thee! Have no fear!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kutch dar nahin hai!&rdquo; King answered. &ldquo;There is no such thing as fear!&rdquo;
+       and Ismail grinned at him, not knowing that King was feeling as Aladdin
+      must have done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have heard you swear,&rdquo; said King; &ldquo;be ye true men!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah-h-h!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have they belongings that ought to be collected first?&rdquo; he asked, and
+      Ismail laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No more than the dead have! A shroud apiece! Ali gave them bitterness to
+      eat and picked their teeth afterward for gleanings! They stand in what
+      they own!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, come!&rdquo; ordered King, turning his back confidently on thirty savages
+      whom Saunders, for instance, would have preferred to drive in front of
+      him, after first seeing them handcuffed. But when he is not pressed for
+      time neither pistols, nor yet handcuffs, are included in King's method.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Each lock has a key, but some keys fit all locks,&rdquo; says the Eastern
+      proverb. King has been chosen for many ticklish errands in his time, and
+      Saunders is still in Delhi.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the great iron door into dim outer darkness King led them and
+      presently made them squat in a close-huddled semicircle on the paving
+      stones, like night-birds waiting for a meal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want blankets for them--two good ones apiece--and food for a
+      week's journey!&rdquo; he told the astonished Saunders; and he spoke so
+      decidedly that the other man's questions and argument died stillborn.
+      &ldquo;While you attend to that for me, I'll be seeing his dibs and making
+      explanations. You look full of news. What do you know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've telephoned all the other stations, and my men swear Yasmini has not
+      left Delhi by train!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King smiled at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I leave by train d'you suppose she'll hear of it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You bet! Bet your boots! Man alive--if she's interested in you by so
+      much,&rdquo;--he measured off a fraction of his little finger end--&ldquo;she
+      knows your next two moves ahead, to say nothing of your past half-dozen! I
+      crossed her bows once and thought I had her at a disadvantage. She laughed
+      at me. On my honor, my spine tingles yet at the mere thought of it! You've
+      never met her? Never heard her laugh? Never seen her eyes? You've a treat
+      in store for you--and a mauvais quat' d'heure! What'll you bet me she
+      doesn't laugh you out of countenance the very first time you meet? Come
+      now--what'll you bet?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not in the habit,&rdquo; King answered, glancing at his watch. &ldquo;Will you see
+      about their rations, please, and the blankets? Thanks!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They went then in opposite directions and the prisoners were left
+      squatting under the eyes and bayonets of a very suspicious prison guard,
+      who made no secret of being ready for all conceivable emergencies. One
+      enthusiast drew the cartridge out of his breech-chamber and licked it at
+      intervals of a minute or two, to the very great interest of the Hillmen,
+      who memorized every detail that by any stretch of imagination might be
+      expected to improve their own shooting when they should get home again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King found his way on foot through a maze of streets to a palace where he
+      was admitted through one door after another by sentries who saluted when
+      he had whispered to them. He ended by sitting on the end of the bed of a
+      gray-headed man who owns three titles and whose word is law between the
+      borders of a province. To him he talked as one schoolboy to a bigger one,
+      because the gray-haired man had understanding, and hence sympathy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't envy you!&rdquo; said he under the sheet. &ldquo;There was an American here
+      not long ago--most amusing man I ever talked to. He had the right
+      expression. 'I do not desiderate that pie!' was his way of putting it.
+      Good, don't you think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All the while he talked the older man was writing on a pad that he held
+      propped by his knees beneath the bedclothes, holding the paper tight to
+      keep it from fluttering in the breeze of a big electric fan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's the release for your prisoners. Take it--and take them!
+      Whatever possessed you to want such a gift?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Orders, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His. He sent for me to Peshawur and gave me strict orders to work with,
+      not against her. This was obvious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How obvious? It seems bewildering!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, sir,--first place, she doesn't want to seem to be connected
+      with me. Otherwise she'd have been more in evidence. Second place, she has
+      left Delhi--his telegram and Saunders' men on oath notwithstanding--and
+      she did not mean to leave those men. I imagine her best way to manage
+      Hillmen is to keep promises, and they say she promised them. Third place,
+      if those thirty men had been anything but her particular pet gang they'd
+      either have been over the border or else in jail before now,--just
+      like all the others. For some reason that I don't pretend to understand,
+      she promised 'em more than she has been able to perform. So I provide
+      performance. She gets the credit for it. I get a pretty good personal
+      following at least as far as up the Khyber! Q.E.D., sir!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man in bed nodded. &ldquo;Not bad,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Didn't she make some effort to get those men away from Ali's?&rdquo; King asked
+      him. &ldquo;I mean, didn't she try to get them dry-nursed by the sirkar in some
+      way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. She did. But it was difficult. In the first place, there didn't seem
+      to be any particular hurry. They were eating Ali's substance. The
+      scoundrel had to feed them as long as he kept them there, and we wanted
+      that. We forbade her to pay their debts to Ali, because he has too urgent
+      need of money just now. He is being pressed on account of debts of his
+      own, and the pressure is making him take risks. He has been begging for
+      money from the German agents. We know who they are, and we expect to make
+      a big haul within a few hours now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hope I didn't spoil things by butting in, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. This is different. She wanted them arrested and locked up at a moment
+      when the jails were all crowded. And then she wanted us to put 'em into
+      trucks and railroad 'em up North out of harm's way as she put it, and we
+      happened to be too busy. The railway staff was overworked. Now things are
+      getting straightened out. I felt it keenly not being able to oblige her,
+      but she asked too much at the wrong moment! I would have done it if I
+      could out of gratitude; it was she who tipped off for us most of the
+      really dangerous men, and it was not her fault a few of them escaped. But
+      we've all been working both tides under, King. Take me; this is my first
+      night in bed in three, and here I am awake! No--nothing personal--glad
+      to see you, but please understand. And I'm a leisured dilettante compared
+      to most of the others. She must have known our fix. She shouldn't have
+      asked.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King smiled. &ldquo;Perfectly good opportunity for me, sir!&rdquo; he said cheerfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So you seem to think. But look out for that woman, King--she's
+      dangerous. She's got the brains of Asia coupled with Western energy! I
+      think she's on our side, and I know he believes it; but watch her!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ham dekta hai!&rdquo; King grinned. But the older man continued to look as if
+      he pitied him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you get through alive, come and tell me about it afterward. Now, mind
+      you do! I'm awfully interested, but as for envying you--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Envy!&rdquo; King almost squealed. He made the bed-springs rattle as he jumped.
+      &ldquo;I wouldn't swap jobs with General French, sir!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor with me, I suppose!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor with you, sir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-by, then. Good-by, King, my boy. Good-by, Athelstan. Your brother's
+      up the Khyber, isn't he? Give him my regards. Good-by!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Long before dawn the thirty prisoners and Ismail squatted in a little herd
+      on the up-platform of a railway station, shepherded by King, who smoked a
+      cheroot some twenty paces away, sitting on an unmarked chest of medicines.
+      He seemed absorbed in a book on surgery that he had borrowed from a
+      chance-met acquaintance in the go-down where he drew the medical supplies.
+      Ismail sat on the one trunk that had been fetched from the other station
+      and nursed the new hand-bag on his knees, picking everlastingly at the
+      lock and wondering audibly what the bag contained to an accompaniment of
+      low-growled sympathy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am his servant--for she said so--and he said so. As the
+      custom is he gave me the key of the great bag--on which I sit--as
+      he said himself, for safe-keeping. Then why--why in Allah's name--am
+      I not to have the key of this bag too? Of this little bag that holds so
+      little and is so light?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It might be money in it?&rdquo; hazarded one of the herd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, for that it is too light.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Paper money!&rdquo; suggested another man. &ldquo;Hundies, with printing on the face
+      that sahibs accept instead of gold.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, I know where his money is,&rdquo; said Ismail. &ldquo;He has but little with
+      him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A razor would slit the leather easily,&rdquo; suggested another man. &ldquo;Then with
+      a hand inserted carefully through the slit, so as not to widen it more
+      than needful, a man could soon discover the contents. And later, the bag
+      might be dropped or pushed violently against some sharp thing, to explain
+      the cut.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why? What could he do to thee?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is because I know not what he would do to me that I will do nothing!&rdquo;
+       answered Ismail. &ldquo;He is not at all like other sahibs I have had dealings
+      with. This man does unexpected things. This man is not mad, he has a
+      devil. I have it in my heart to love this man. But such talk is
+      foolishness. We are all her men!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye! We are her men!&rdquo; came the chorus, so that King looked up and watched
+      them over the open book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At dawn, when the train pulled out, the thirty prisoners sat safely locked
+      in third-class compartments. King lay lazily on the cushions of a
+      first-class carriage in the rear, utterly absorbed in the principles of
+      antiseptic dressing, as if that had anything to do with Prussians and the
+      Khyber Pass; and Ismail attended to the careful packing of soda water
+      bottles in the ice-box on the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall I open the little bag, sahib?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail shook the bag.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sound is as of things of much importance all disordered,&rdquo; he said
+      sagely. &ldquo;It might be well to rearrange.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Put it over there!&rdquo; King ordered. &ldquo;Set it down!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail obeyed and King laid his book down to light another of his black
+      cheroots. The theme of antiseptics ceased to exercise its charm over him.
+      He peeled off his tunic, changed his shirt and lay back in sweet
+      contentment. Headed for the &ldquo;Hills,&rdquo; who would not be contented, who had
+      been born in their very shadow?--in their shadow, of a line of
+      Britons who have all been buried there!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The day after to-morrow I'll see snow!&rdquo; he promised himself. And Ismail,
+      grinning with yellow teeth through a gap in his wayward beard, understood
+      and sympathized.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Forward in the third-class carriages the prisoners hugged themselves and
+      crooned as they met old landmarks and recognized the changing scenery.
+      There was a new cleaner tang in the hot wind that spoke of the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; and
+      home!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Delhi had drawn them as Monte Carlo attracts the gamblers of all Europe.
+      But Delhi had spewed them out again, and oh! how exquisite the promise of
+      the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; was, and the thunder of the train that hurried--the
+      bumping wheels that sang Himahlayas--Himahlyas!--the air that
+      blew in on them unscented--the reawakened memory--the heart's
+      desire for the cold and the snow and the cruelty--the dark nights and
+      the shrieking storms and the savagery of the Land of the Knife ahead!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The journey to Peshawur, that ought to have been wearisome because they
+      were everlastingly shunted into sidings to make way for roaring
+      south-bound troop trains and kept waiting at every wayside station because
+      the trains ahead of them were blocked three deep, was no less than a
+      jubilee progress!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not a packed-in regiment went by that was not howled at by King's
+      prisoners as if they were blood-brothers of every man in it. Many an
+      officer whom King knew waved to him from a passing train.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Meet you in Berlin!&rdquo; was a favorite greeting. And after that they would
+      shout to him for news and be gone before King could answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many a man, at stations where the sidings were all full and nothing less
+      than miracles seemed able to release the wedged-in trains, came and paced
+      up and down a platform side by side with King. From them he received
+      opinions, but no sympathy to speak of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Got to stay in India? Hard lines!&rdquo; Then the conversation would be bluntly
+      changed, for in the height of one's enthusiasm it is not decent to hurt
+      another fellow's feelings. Simple, simple as a little child is the
+      clean-clipped British officer. &ldquo;Look at that babu, now. Don't you think
+      he's a marvel? Don't you think the Indian babu's a marvel? Sixty a month
+      is more than the beggar gets, and there he goes, doing two jobs and
+      straightening out tangled trains into the bargain! Isn't he a wonder,
+      King?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;India's a wonderful country,&rdquo; King would answer, that being one of his
+      stock remarks. And to his credit be it written that he never laughed at
+      one of them. He let them think they were more fortunate than he, with
+      manlier, bloodier work to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peshawur, when they reached it at last, looked dusty and bleak in the
+      comfortless light of Northern dawn. But the prisoners crowed and crooned
+      it a greeting, and there was not much grumbling when King refused to
+      unlock their compartment doors. Having waited thus long, they could endure
+      a few more hours in patience, now that they could see and smell their
+      &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there was the general again, not in a dog-cart this time, but
+      furiously driven in a motor-car, roaring and clattering into the station
+      less than two minutes after the train arrived. He was out of the car, for
+      all his age and weight, before it had come to a stand. He took one steady
+      look at King and then at the prisoners before he returned King's salute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; he said. And then, as if that were not enough: &ldquo;Excellent! Don't
+      let 'em out, though, to chew the rag with people on the platform. Keep 'em
+      in!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They're locked in, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Excellent! Come and walk up and down with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter V
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Death roosts in the Khyber while he preens his wings!
+     --Native Proverb
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Seen her?&rdquo; asked the general, with his hands behind him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said King, looking sharply sidewise at him and walking stride for
+      stride. His hands were behind him, too, and one of them covered the gold
+      bracelet on his other wrist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The general looked equally sharply sidewise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor've I,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;She called me up over the phone yesterday to ask for
+      facilities for her man Rewa Gunga, and he was in here later. He's waiting
+      for you at the foot of the Pass--camped near the fort at Jamrud with
+      your bandobast all ready. She's on ahead--wouldn't wait.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King listened in silence, and his prisoners, watching him through the
+      barred compartment windows, formed new and golden opinions of him, for it
+      is common knowledge in the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; that when a burra sahib speaks to a
+      chota sahib, the chota sahib ought to say, &ldquo;Yes, sir, oh, yes!&rdquo; at very
+      short intervals. Therefore King could not be a chota sahib after all. So
+      much the better. The &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; ever loved to deal with men in authority,
+      just as they ever despised underlings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What made you go back for the prisoners?&rdquo; the general asked. &ldquo;Who gave
+      you that cue?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a safe rule never to do what the other man expects, sir, and Rewa
+      Gunga expected me to travel by his train.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was that your only reason?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, sir. I had general reasons. None of 'em specific. Where natives have
+      a finger in the pie there's always something left undone at the last
+      minute.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what made you investigate those prisoners?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Couldn't imagine why thirty men should be singled out for special
+      treatment. Rewa Gunga told me they were still at large in Delhi. Couldn't
+      guess why. Had 'em arrested so's to be able to question 'em. That's all,
+      sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not nearly all!&rdquo; said the general. &ldquo;You realize by now, I suppose, that
+      they're her special men--special personal following?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Guessed something of that sort.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well--she's clever. It occurred to her that the safest way to get
+      'em up North was to have 'em arrested and deported. That would avoid
+      interference and delay and would give her a chance to act deliverer at
+      this end, and so make 'em grateful to her--you see? Rewa Gunga told
+      me all this, you understand. He seems to think she's semi-divine. He was
+      full of her cleverness in having thought of letting 'em all get into debt
+      at a house of ill repute, so as to have 'em at hand when she wanted 'em.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She must have learned that trick from our merchant marine,&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Maybe. She's clever. She asked me over the phone whether her thirty men
+      had started North. I sent a telegram in cypher to find out. The answer was
+      that you had found 'em and rounded 'em up and were bringing 'em with you.
+      When she called me up on the phone the second time I told her so, and I
+      heard her chuckle with delight. So I emphasized the point of your having
+      discovered 'em and saved 'em every wit whole and all that kind of thing. I
+      asked her to come and see me, but she wouldn't,--said she was
+      disguised and particularly did not want to be recognized, which was
+      reasonable enough. She sent Rewa Gunga instead. Now, this seems important:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before I sent you down to Delhi--before I sent for you at all--I
+      told her what I meant to do, and I never in my life knew a woman raise
+      such terrific objections to working with a man. As it happened her
+      objections only confirmed my determination to send for you, and before she
+      went down to Delhi to clean up I told her flatly she would either have to
+      work with you or else stay in India for the duration of the war.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The general did not notice that King was licking his lips. Nor, if he had
+      noticed King's hand that now was in front of him pressing on something
+      under his shirt, could he have guessed that the something was a
+      gold-hilted knife with a bronze blade. King grunted in token of attention,
+      and the general continued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She gave in finally, but I felt nervous about it. Now, without your
+      getting sight of her--you say you haven't seen her?--her whole
+      attitude has changed! What have you done? Bringing up her thirty men seems
+      a little enough thing. Yet, she swears by you! Used to swear at you, and
+      now says you're the only officer in the British army with enough brains to
+      fill a helmet! Says she wouldn't go up the Khyber without you! Says you're
+      indispensable! Sent Rewa Gunga round to me with orders to make sure I
+      don't change my mind about you! What have you done to her--bewitched
+      her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Done nothing,&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, keep on doing nothing in the same style and the world shall render
+      you its best jobs, one after the other, in sequence! You've made a good
+      beginning!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Know anything of Rewa Gunga, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing, except that he's her man. She trusts him, so we've got to, and
+      you've got to take him up the Khyber with you. What she orders, he'll do,
+      or you may take it from me she would never have left him behind. As long
+      as she is on our side you will be pretty safe in trusting Rewa Gunga. And
+      she has got to be on our side. Got to be! She's the only key we've got to
+      Khinjan, and hell is brewing there this minute! She dare unlock the gates
+      and ride the devil down the Khyber if she thought it worth her while!
+      You're to go up the Khyber after her to convince her that there are better
+      mounts than the devil and better fun than playing with hell-fire! The
+      Rangar told me he had given you her passport--that right?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As they turned at the end of the platform King bared his wrist and showed
+      the gold bracelet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; said the general, but King thought his face clouded. &ldquo;That thing
+      is worth more than a hundred men. Jack Allison wore that same bracelet,
+      unless I'm much mistaken, on his way down in disguise from Bukhara. So did
+      another man we both knew; but he died. Be sure not to forget to give it
+      back to her when the show's over, King.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King nodded and grunted. &ldquo;What's the news from Khinjan, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing specific, except that the place is filling up. You remember what
+      I told you about the 'Heart of the Hills' being in Khinjan? Well, they say
+      now that the 'Heart of the Hills' has been awake for a long time, and that
+      when the heart stirs the body does not lie quiet long. No use trying to
+      guess what they mean; go and find out. And remember--the whole armed
+      force at my disposal in this Province isn't more than enough to tempt the
+      tribes to conclusions! It's a case for diplomacy. It's a case where
+      diplomacy must not fail.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King said nothing, but the chin-strap mark on his cheek and chin grew
+      slightly whiter, as it always does under the stress of emotion. He can not
+      control it, and he has dyed it more than once on the eve of happenings,
+      there being no more wisdom in wearing feelings on one's face than on a
+      sleeve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here comes your engine,&rdquo; said the general. &ldquo;Well--there are two
+      battalions of Khyber Rifles up the Pass and they're about at full
+      strength. They've got word already that you are gazetted to them. They'll
+      expect you. By the way, you've a brother in the K.R., haven't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At Ali Masjid, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give him my regards when you see him, will you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's your engine whistling. You'd better hurry, Good-by, my boy. Get
+      word to me whenever possible. Good luck to you! Regards to your brother!
+      Good-by!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King saluted and stood watching while the general hurried to the waiting
+      motor-car. When the car whirled away in a din of dust he returned
+      leisurely to the train that had been shortened to three coaches. Then he
+      gave the signal to start up the spur-track, that leads to Jamrud, where a
+      fort cowers in the very throat of the dreadfulest gorge in Asia--the
+      Khyber Pass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not a long journey, nor a very slow one, for there was nothing to
+      block the way except occasional men with flags, who guarded culverts and
+      little bridges. The Germans would know better than to waste time or effort
+      on blowing up that track, but there might be Northern gentlemen at large,
+      out to do damage for the sport of it, and the sepoys all along the line
+      were posted in twos, and awake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was low-tide under the Himalayas. The flood that was draining India of
+      her armed men had left Jamrud high and dry with a little nondescript force
+      stranded there, as it were, under a British major and some native
+      officers. There were no more pomp and circumstance; no more of the
+      reassuring thunder of gathering regiments, nor for that matter any more of
+      that unarmed native helplessness that so stiffens the backs of the
+      official English.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Frowning over Jamrud were the lean &ldquo;Hills,&rdquo; peopled by the fiercest
+      fighting men on earth, and the clouds that hung over the Khyber's course
+      were an accent to the savagery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But King smiled merrily as he jumped out of the train, and Rewa Gunga, who
+      was there to meet him, advanced with outstretched hand and a smile that
+      would have melted snow on the distant peaks if he had only looked the
+      other way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Welcome, King sahib!&rdquo; he laughed, with the air of a skilled fencer who
+      admires another, better one. &ldquo;I shall know better another time and let you
+      keep in front of me! No more getting first into a train and settling down
+      for the night! It may not be easy to follow you, and I suspect it isn't,
+      but at least it jolly well can't be such a job as leading you! I trust you
+      had a comfortable journey?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks,&rdquo; said King, shaking hands with him, and then turning away to
+      unlock the carriage doors that held his prisoners in. They were baying now
+      like wolves to be free, and they surged out, like wolves from a cage, to
+      clamor round the Rangar, pawing him and struggling to be first to ask him
+      questions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, ye mountain people; nay!&rdquo; he laughed. &ldquo;I, too, am from the plains!
+      What do I know of your families or of your feuds? Am I to be torn to
+      pieces to make a meal?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At that Ismail interfered, with the aid of an ash pick-handle,
+      chance-found beside the track.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hill-bastards!&rdquo; he howled at them, beating at them as if they were
+      sheaves and his cudgel were a flail. &ldquo;Sons of nameless mothers! Forgotten
+      of God! Shameless! Brood of the evil one! Hands off!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King had to stop him, not that he feared trouble, for they did not seem to
+      resent either abuse or cudgeling in the least--and that in itself was
+      food for thought; but broken shoulders are no use for carrying loads.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Laughing as if the whole thing was the greatest joke imaginable, Rewa
+      Gunga fell into stride beside King and led him away in the direction of
+      some tents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is up the Pass ahead of us,&rdquo; he announced. &ldquo;She was in the deuce of a
+      hurry, I can assure you. She wanted to wait and meet you, but matters were
+      too jolly well urgent, and we shall have our bally work cut out to catch
+      her, you can bet! But I have everything ready--tents and beds and
+      stores--everything!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King looked over his shoulder to make sure that Ismail was bringing the
+      little leather bag along.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So have I,&rdquo; he said quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have horses,&rdquo; said Rewa Gunga, &ldquo;and mules and--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did she travel up the Khyber?&rdquo; King asked him, and the Rangar spared
+      him a curious sidewise glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On a horse. You should have seen the horse!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What escort had she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rewa Gunga chuckled and then suddenly grew serious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The 'Hills' are her escort, King sahib. She is mistress in the 'Hills.'
+      There isn't a murdering ruffian who would not lie down and let her walk on
+      him! She rode away alone on a thoroughbred mare and she jolly well left me
+      the mare's double on which to follow her. Come and look.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Not far from where the tents had been pitched in a cluster a string of
+      horses winnied at a picket rope. King saw the two good horses ready for
+      himself, and ten mules beside them that would have done credit to any
+      outfit. But at the end of the line, pawing at the trampled grass, was a
+      black mare that made his eyes open wide. Once in a hundred years or so a
+      viceroy's cup, or a Derby is won by an animal that can stand and look and
+      move as that mare did.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just watch!&rdquo; the Rangar boasted; hooking up the bit and throwing off the
+      blanket. And as he mounted into the native-made rough-hide saddle a shout
+      went up from the fort and native officers and half the soldiery came out
+      to watch the poetry of motion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mare was not the only one worth watching; her rider shared the praise.
+      There was something unexpected, although not in the least ungainly, about
+      the Rangar's seat in the saddle that was not the ordinary, graceful native
+      balance and yet was full of grace. King ascribed the difference to the
+      fact that the Rangar had seen no military service, and before the
+      inadequacy of that explanation had asserted itself he had already
+      forgotten to criticize in sheer admiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was none of the spurring and back-reining that some native bloods of
+      India mistake for horse-manship. The Rangar rode with sympathy and most
+      consummate skill, and the result was that the mare behaved as if she were
+      part of him, responding to his thoughts, putting a foot where he wished
+      her to put it and showing her wildest turn of speed along a level stretch
+      in instant response to his mood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never saw anything better,&rdquo; King admitted ungrudgingly, as the mare came
+      back at a walk to her picket rope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is only one mare like this one,&rdquo; laughed the Rangar. &ldquo;She has her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What'll you take for this one?&rdquo; King asked him. &ldquo;Name your price!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The mare is hers. You must ask her. Who knows? She is generous. There is
+      nobody on earth more generous than she when she cares to be. See what you
+      wear on your wrist!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is a loan,&rdquo; said King, uncovering the bracelet. &ldquo;I shall give it
+      back to her when we meet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;See what she says when you meet!&rdquo; laughed the Rangar, taking a cigarette
+      from his jeweled case with an air and smiling as he lighted it. &ldquo;There is
+      your tent, sahib.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He motioned with the cigarette toward a tent pitched quite a hundred yards
+      away from the others and from the Rangar's own; with the Rangar's and the
+      cluster of tents for the men it made an equilateral triangle, so that both
+      he and the Rangar had privacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a nod of dismissal, King walked over to inspect the bandobast, and
+      finding it much more extravagant than he would have dreamed of providing
+      for himself, he lit one of his black cheroots, and with hands clasped
+      behind him strolled over to the fort to interview Courtenay, the officer
+      commanding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It so happened that Courtenay had gone up the Pass that morning with his
+      shotgun after quail. He came back into view, followed by his little
+      ten-man escort just as King neared the fort, and King timed his approach
+      so as to meet him. The men of the escort were heavily burdened; he could
+      see that from a distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hello!&rdquo; he said by the fort gate, cheerily, after he had saluted and the
+      salute had been returned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, hello, King! Glad to see you. Heard you were coming, of course.
+      Anything I can do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me anything you know,&rdquo; said King, offering him a cheroot which the
+      other accepted. As he bit off the end they stood facing each other, so
+      that King could see the oncoming escort and what it carried. Courtenay
+      read his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two of my men!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Found 'em up the Pass. Gazi work I think. They
+      were cut all to pieces. There's a big lashkar gathering somewhere in the
+      'Hills,' and it might have been done by their skirmishers, but I don't
+      think so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A lashkar besides the crowd at Khinjan?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who's supposed to be leading it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't find out,&rdquo; said Courtenay. Then he stepped aside to give orders to
+      the escort. They carried the dead bodies into the fort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Know anything of Yasmini?&rdquo; King asked, when the major stood in front of
+      him again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By reputation, of course, yes. Famous person--sings like a bulbul--dances
+      like the devil--lived in Delhi--mean her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King nodded. &ldquo;When did she start up the Pass?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How d'ye mean?&rdquo; Courtenay demanded sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To-day or yesterday?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She didn't start! I know who goes up and who comes down. Would you care
+      to glance over the list?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Know anything of Rewa Gunga?&rdquo; King asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not much. Tried to buy his mare. Seen the animal? Gad! I'd give a year's
+      pay for that beast! He wouldn't sell and I don't blame him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He goes up the Khyber with me,&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;He's what the Turks would
+      call my youldash.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the Persians a hamrah, eh? There was an American here lately--merry
+      fellow--and I was learning his language. Side partner's the word in
+      the States. I can imagine a worse side partner than that same man Rewa
+      Gunga--much worse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He told me just now,&rdquo; said King, &ldquo;that Yasmini went up the Pass
+      unescorted, mounted on a mare the very dead spit of the black one you say
+      you wanted to buy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Courtenay whistled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sorry, King. I'm sorry to say he lied.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you come and listen while I have it out with him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King threw away his less-than-half-consumed cheroot and they started to
+      walk together toward King's camp. After a few minutes they arrived at a
+      point from which they could see the prisoners lined up in a row facing
+      Rewa Gunga. A less experienced eye than King's or Courtenay's could have
+      recognized their attitude of reverent obedience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He'll make a good adjutant for you, that man,&rdquo; said Courtenay; but King
+      only grunted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At sight of them Ismail left the line and came hurrying toward them with
+      long mountainman's strides.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell Rewa Gunga sahib that I wish to speak to him!&rdquo; King called, and
+      Ismail hurried back again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within two minutes the Rangar stood facing them, looking more at ease than
+      they.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was cautioning those savages!&rdquo; he explained. &ldquo;They're an escort, but
+      they need a reminder of the fact, else they might jolly well imagine
+      themselves mountain goats and scatter among the 'Hills'!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew out his wonderful cigarette case and offered it open to Courtenay,
+      who hesitated, and then helped himself. King refused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Major Courtenay has just told me,&rdquo; said King, &ldquo;that nobody resembling
+      Yasmini has gone up the Pass recently. Can you explain?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, I've been watching the Pass,&rdquo; explained Courtenay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rangar shook his head, blew smoke through his nose and laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you did not see her go?&rdquo; he said, as if he were very much amused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Courtenay. &ldquo;She didn't go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can you explain?&rdquo; asked King rather stiffly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean, can I explain why the major failed to see her? 'Pon my soul,
+      King sahib, d'you want me to insult the man? Yasmini is too jolly clever
+      for me, or for any other man I ever met; and the major's a man, isn't he?
+      He may pack the Khyber so full of men that there's only standing room and
+      still she'll go up without his leave if she chooses! There is nobody like
+      Yasmini in all the world!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rangar was looking past them, facing the great gorge that lets the
+      North of Asia trickle down into India and back again when weather and the
+      tribes permit. His eyes had become interested in the distance. King
+      wondered why--and looked--and saw. Courtenay saw, too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hail that man and bring him here!&rdquo; he ordered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail, keeping his distance with ears and eyes peeled, heard instantly
+      and hurried off. He went like the wind and all three watched in silence
+      for ten minutes while he headed off a man near the mouth of the Pass,
+      stopped him, spoke to him and brought him along. Fifteen minutes later an
+      Afridi stood scowling in front of them with a little letter in a cleft
+      stick in his hand. He held it out and Courtenay took it and sniffed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well--I'll be blessed! A note&rdquo;--sniff--sniff--&ldquo;on
+      scented paper!&rdquo; Sniff--sniff! &ldquo;Carried down the Khyber in a split
+      stick! Take it, King--it's addressed to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King obeyed and sniffed too. It smelt of something far more subtle than
+      musk. He recognized the same strange scent that had been wafted from
+      behind Yasmini's silken hangings in her room in Delhi. As he unfolded the
+      note--it was not sealed--he found time for a swift glance at
+      Rewa Gunga's face. The Rangar seemed interested and amused.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;Dear Captain King,&rdquo; the note ran, in English.  &ldquo;Kindly
+        be quick to follow me, because there is much talk of a
+        lashkar getting ready for a raid.  I shall wait for
+        you in Khinjan, whither my messenger shall show the way.
+        Please let him keep his rifle.  Trust him, and Rewa
+        Gunga and my thirty whom you brought with you.  The
+        messenger's name is Darya Khan.
+
+                &ldquo;Your servant,
+
+                        &ldquo;Ysamini.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      He passed the note to Courtenay, who read it and passed it back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you the messenger who is to show this sahib the road to Khinjan?&rdquo; he
+      asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you are one of three who left here and went up the Pass at dawn! I
+      recognize you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo; said the man. &ldquo;She met me and gave me this letter and sent me
+      back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How great is the lashkar that is forming?&rdquo; asked Courtenay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some say three thousand men. They speak truth. They who say five thousand
+      are liars. There is a lashkar.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And she went up alone?&rdquo; King murmured aloud in Pashtu.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is the moon alone in the sky?&rdquo; the fellow asked, and King smiled at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us hurry after her, sahib!&rdquo; urged Rewa Gunga, and King looked
+      straight into his eyes, that were like pools of fire, just as they had
+      been that night in the room in Delhi. He nodded and the Rangar grinned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better wait until dawn,&rdquo; advised Courtenay. &ldquo;The Pass is supposed to be
+      closed at dusk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall have to ask for special permission, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Granted, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, we'll start at eight to-night!&rdquo; said King, glancing at his watch
+      and snapping the gold case shut.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dine with me,&rdquo; said Courtenay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, please. Got to pack first. Daren't trust anybody else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well. We'll dine in my tent at six-thirty,&rdquo; said Courtenay. &ldquo;So
+      long!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So long, sir,&rdquo; said King, and each went about his own business, King with
+      the Rangar, and Ismail and all thirty prisoners at his heels, and
+      Courtenay alone, but that much more determined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll find out,&rdquo; the major muttered, &ldquo;how she got up the Pass without my
+      knowing it. Somebody's tail shall be twisted for this!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he did not find out until King told him, and that was many days later,
+      when a terrible cloud no longer threatened India from the North.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter VI
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Oh, a broken blade,
+     And an empty bag,
+     And a sodden kit,
+     And a foundered nag,
+     And a whimpering wind
+     Are more or less
+     Ground for a gentleman's distress.
+     Yet the blade will cut,
+     (He should swing with a will!)
+     And the emptiest bag
+     He may readiest fill;
+     And the nag will trot
+     If the man has a mind,
+     So the kit he may dry
+     In the whimpering wind.
+     Shades of a gallant past--confess!
+     How many fights were won with less?
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I envy you!&rdquo; said Courtenay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were seated in Courtenay's tent, face to face across the low table,
+      with guttering lights between and Ismail outside the tent handing plates
+      and things to Courtenay's servant inside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're about the first who has admitted it,&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not far from them a herd of pack-camels grunted and bubbled after the
+      evening meal. The evening breeze brought the smoke of dung fires down to
+      them, and an Afghan--one of the little crowd of traders who had come
+      down with the camels three hours ago--sang a wailing song about his
+      lady-love. Overhead the sky was like black velvet, pierced with silver
+      holes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, you can't call our end of this business war--it's sport,&rdquo;
+       said Courtenay. &ldquo;Two battalions of Khyber Rifles, hired to hold the Pass
+      against their own relations. Against them a couple of hundred thousand
+      tribesmen, very hungry for loot, armed with up-to-date rifles, thanks to
+      Russia yesterday and Germany to-day, and all perfectly well aware that a
+      world war is in progress. That's sport, you know--not the 'image and
+      likeness of war' that Jorrocks called it, but the real red root. And
+      you've got a mystery thrown in to give it piquancy. I haven't found out
+      yet how Yasmini got up the Pass without my knowledge. I thought it was a
+      trick. Didn't believe she'd gone. Yet all my men swear they know she has
+      gone, and not one of them will own to having seen her go! What d'you think
+      of that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell you later,&rdquo; said King, &ldquo;when I've been in the 'Hills' a while.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What d'you suppose I'm going to say, eh? Shall I enter in my diary that a
+      chit came down the Pass from a woman who never went up it? Or shall I say
+      she went up while I was looking the other way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Help yourself!&rdquo; laughed King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Laugh on! I envy you! If the worst comes to the worst, you'll have had
+      the best end of it. If you fail up there in the 'Hills' you'll get
+      scoughed and be done with you. You'll at least have had a show. All we
+      shall know of your failure will be the arrival of the flood! We'll be
+      swamped ingloriously--shot, skinned alive and crucified without a
+      chance of doing anything but wait for it! You're in luck--you can
+      move about and keep off the fidgets!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a while, as he ate Courtenay's broiled quail, King did not answer. But
+      the merry smile had left his eyes and he seemed for once to be letting his
+      mind dwell on conditions as they concerned himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How many men have you at the fort?&rdquo; he asked at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two hundred. Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All natives?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To a man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+<p>
+        &ldquo;Like 'em?&rdquo;
+ </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the use of talking?&rdquo; answered Courtenay. &ldquo;You know what it means
+      when men of an alien race stand up to you and grin when they salute.
+      They're my own.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King nodded. &ldquo;Die with you, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To the last man,&rdquo; said Courtenay quietly with that conviction that can
+      only be arrived at in one way, and that not the easiest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd die alone,&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;It'll be lonely in the 'Hills.' Got any more
+      quail?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And that was all he ever did say on that subject, then or at any other
+      time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here's to her!&rdquo; laughed Courtenay at last, rising and holding up his
+      glass. &ldquo;We can't explain her, so let's drink to her! No heel-taps! Here's
+      to Rewa Gunga's mistress, Yasmini!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May she show good hunting!&rdquo; answered King, draining his glass; and it was
+      his first that day. &ldquo;If it weren't for that note of hers that came down
+      the Pass, and for one or two other things, I'd almost believe her a myth--one
+      of those supposititious people who are supposed to express some ideal or
+      other. Not an hallucination, you understand--nor exactly an embodied
+      spirit, either. Perhaps the spirit of a problem. Let y be the Khyber
+      district, z the tribes, and x the spirit of the rumpus. Find x. Get me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not exactly. Got quinine in your kit, by the way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Plenty, thanks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What shall you do first after you get up the Pass? Call on your brother
+      at Ali Masjid? He's likely to know a lot by the time you get there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not sure,&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;May and may not. I'd like to see him. Haven't seen
+      the old chap in a donkey's age. How is he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well two days ago,&rdquo; said Courtenay. &ldquo;What's your general plan?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hunt!&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;Hunt for x and report. Hunt for the spirit of the
+      coming ruction and try to scrag it! Live in the open when I can, sleep
+      with the lice when it rains or snows, eat dead goat and bad bread, I
+      expect; scratch myself when I'm not looking, and take a tub at the first
+      opportunity. When you see me on my way back, have a bath made ready for
+      me, will you--and keep to windward!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly!&rdquo; said Courtenay. &ldquo;What's the Rangar going to do with that mare
+      of his? Suppose he'll leave her at Ali Masjid? He'll have to leave her
+      somewhere on the way. She'll get stolen. Gad! That's the brightest notion
+      yet! I'll make a point of buying her from the first horse-thief who comes
+      traipsing down the Pass!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here's wishing you luck!&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;It's time to go, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose, and Courtenay walked with him to where his party waited in the
+      dark, chilled by the cold wind whistling down the Khyber. Rewa Gunga sat,
+      mounted, at their head, and close to him his personal servant rode another
+      horse. Behind them were the mules, and then in a cluster, each with a load
+      of some sort on his head, were the thirty prisoners, and Ismail took
+      charge of them officiously. Darya Khan, the man who had brought the letter
+      down the Pass, kept close to Ismail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you armed?&rdquo; King asked, as soon as he could see the whites of the
+      Rangar's eyes through the gloom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You jolly well bet I am!&rdquo; the Rangar laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King mounted, and Courtenay shook hands; then he went to Rewa Gunga's side
+      and shook hands with him, too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-by!&rdquo; called King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-by and good luck!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forward! March!&rdquo; King ordered, and the little procession started.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, men of the 'Hills,' ye look like ghosts--like graveyard ghosts!&rdquo;
+       jeered Courtenay, as they all filed past him. &ldquo;Ye look like dead men,
+      going to be judged!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nobody answered. They strode behind the horses, with the swift silent
+      strides of men who are going home to the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo;; but even they, born in
+      the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo;' and knowing them as a wolf-pack knows its hunting-ground,
+      were awed by the gloom of Khyber-mouth ahead. King's voice was the first
+      to break the silence, and he did not speak until Courtenay was out of
+      ear-shot. Then:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men of the 'Hills'!&rdquo; he called. &ldquo;Kuch dar nahin hai!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nahin hai! Hah!&rdquo; shouted Ismail. &ldquo;So speaks a man! Hear that, ye mountain
+      folk! He says, 'There is no such thing as fear!'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In his place in the lead, King whistled softly to himself; but he drew an
+      automatic pistol from its place beneath his armpit and transferred it to a
+      readier position.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fear or no fear, Khyber-mouth is haunted after dark by the men whose
+      blood-feuds are too reeking raw to let them dare go home and for whom the
+      British hangman very likely waits a mile or two farther south. It is one
+      of the few places in the world where a pistol is better than a thick
+      stick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boulder, crag and loose rock faded into gloom behind; in front on both
+      hands ragged hillsides were beginning to close in; and the wind, whose
+      home is in Allah's refuse heap, whistled as it searched busily among the
+      black ravines. Then presently the shadow of the thousand-foot-high Khyber
+      walls began to cover them, and King drew rein to count them all and let
+      them close up. To have let them straggle after that point would be
+      tantamount to murder probably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ride last!&rdquo; he ordered Rewa Gunga. &ldquo;You've got the only other pistol,
+      haven't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Darya Khan, who had brought the letter, had a rifle; so King gave him a
+      roving commission on the right flank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They moved on again after five minutes, in the same deep silence, looking
+      like ghosts in search of somebody to ferry them across the Styx. Only the
+      glow of King's cheroot, and the lesser, quicker fire of Rewa Gunga's
+      cigarette, betrayed humanity, except that once or twice King's horse would
+      put a foot wrong and be spoken to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hold up!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But from five or ten yards away that might have been a new note in the
+      gaining wind or even nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a while King's cheroot went out, and he threw it away. A little
+      later Rewa Gunga threw away his cigarette. After that, the veriest
+      five-year-old among the Zakka Khels, watching sleepless over the rim of
+      some stone watch-tower, could have taken oath that the Khyber's unburied
+      dead were prowling in search of empty graves. Probably their uncanny
+      silence was their best protection; but Rewa Gunga chose to break it after
+      a time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;King sahib!&rdquo; he called softly, repeating it louder and more loudly until
+      King heard him. &ldquo;Slowly! Not so fast!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King did not check speed by a fraction, but the Rangar legged his mare
+      into a canter and forced him to pull out to the left of the track and make
+      room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because, sahib, there are men among those boulders, and to go too fast is
+      to make them think you are afraid! To seem afraid is to invite attack! Can
+      we defend ourselves, with three firearms between us? Look! What was that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They were at the point where the road begins to lead up-hill, westward,
+      leaving the bed of a ravine and ascending to join the highway built by
+      British engineers. Below, to left and right, was pit-mouth gloom, shadows
+      amid shadows, full of eerie whisperings, and King felt the short hair on
+      his neck begin to rise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he urged his horse forward, because what Rewa Gunga said is true. There
+      is only one surer key to trouble in the Khyber than to seem afraid--and
+      that is to be afraid. And to have sat his horse there listening to the
+      Rangar's whisperings and trying to see through shadows would have been to
+      invite fear, of the sort that grows into panic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rangar followed him, close up, and both horse and mare sensed
+      excitement. The mare's steel shoes sent up a shower of sparks, and King
+      turned to rebuke the Rangar. Yet he did not speak. Never, in all the years
+      he had known India and the borderland beyond, had he seen eyes so
+      suggestive of a tiger's in the dark! Yet they were not the same color as a
+      tiger's, nor the same size, nor the same shape!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look, sahib!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look at what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a second or two he caught a glimpse of bluish flame that flashed
+      suddenly and died again, somewhere below to the right. Then all at once
+      the flame burned brighter and steadier and began to move and to grow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Halt!&rdquo; King thundered; and his voice was as sharp and unexpected as a
+      pistol-crack. This was something tangible, that a man could tackle--a
+      perfect antidote for nerves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The blue light continued on a zigzag course, as if a man were running
+      among boulders with an unusual sort of torch; and as there was no answer
+      King drew his pistol, took about thirty seconds' aim and fired. He fired
+      straight at the blue light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It vanished instantly, into measureless black silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now you've jolly well done it, haven't you!&rdquo;' the Rangar laughed in his
+      ear. &ldquo;That was her blue light--Yasmini's!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a minute before King answered, for both animals were all but
+      frantic with their sense of their riders' state of mind; it needed
+      horsemanship to get them back under control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you know whose light it was?&rdquo; King demanded, when the horse and
+      mare were head to head again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was prearranged. She promised me a signal at the point where I am to
+      leave the track!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where's that guide?&rdquo; demanded King; and Darya Khan came forward out of
+      the night, with his rifle cocked and ready.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did she not say Khinjan is the destination?&rdquo;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo; the fellow answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know the way to Khinjan. That is not it. Get down there and find out
+      what that light was. Shout back what you find!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man obeyed instantly and sprang down into darkness. But King had
+      hardly given the order when shame told him he had sent a native on an
+      errand he had no liking for himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come back!&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;I'll go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the man had gone, slipping noiselessly in the dark from rock to rock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So King drove both spurs home, and set his unwilling horse to scrambling
+      downward at an angle he could not guess, into blackness he could feel,
+      trusting the animal to find a footing where his own eyes could make out
+      nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To his disgust he heard the Rangar follow immediately. To his even greater
+      disgust the black mare overtook him. And even then, with his own mount
+      stumbling and nearly pitching him headforemost at each lurch, he was
+      forced to admire the mare's goatlike agility, for she descended into the
+      gorge in running leaps, never setting a wrong foot. When he and his horse
+      reached the bottom at last he found the Rangar waiting for him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This way, sahib!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next he knew sparks from the black mare's heels were kicking up in
+      front of him, and a wild ride had begun such as he had never yet dreamed
+      of. There was no catching up, for the black mare could gallop two to his
+      horse's one; but he set his teeth and followed into solid night, trusting
+      ear, eye, guesswork and the God of Secret Service men who loves the
+      reckless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once in a minute or so he would see a spark, or a shower of them, where
+      the mare took a turn in a hurry. Once in every two or three minutes he
+      caught sight for a second of the same blue siren light that had started
+      the race. He suspected that there were many torches placed at intervals.
+      It could not be one man running. More than once it occurred to him to draw
+      and shoot, but that thought died into the darkness whence it came. Never
+      once while he rode did he forget to admire the Rangar's courage or the
+      black mare's speed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His own horse developed a speed and stamina he had not suspected, and
+      probably the Rangar did not dare extend the mare to her limit in the dark;
+      at all events, for ten, perhaps fifteen, minutes of breathless galloping
+      he almost made a race of it, keeping the Rangar, either within sight or
+      sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But then the mare swerved suddenly behind a boulder and was gone. He
+      spurred round the same great rock a minute later, and was faced by a blank
+      wall of shale that brought his horse up all standing. It led steep up for
+      a thousand feet to the sky-line. There was not so much as a goat-track to
+      show in which direction the mare had gone, nor a sound of any kind to
+      guide him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He dismounted and stumbled about on foot for about ten minutes with his
+      eyes two feet from the earth, trying to find some trace of hoof. Then he
+      listened, with his ear to the ground. There was no result.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He knew better than to shout, for that would sound like a cry of distress,
+      and there is no mercy whatever in the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; for lost wanderers, or for
+      men who seem lost. He had not a doubt there were men with long jezails
+      lurking not far away, to say nothing of those responsible for the blue
+      torchlight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After some thought be mounted and began to hunt the way back, remembering
+      turns and twists with a gift for direction that natives might well have
+      envied him. He found his way back to the foot of the road at a trot, where
+      ninety-nine men out of almost any hundred would have been lost hopelessly;
+      and close to the road he overtook Darya Khan, hugging his rifle and
+      staring about like a scorpion at bay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you expect that blue light, and this galloping away?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, sahib; I knew nothing of it! I was told to lead the way to Khinjan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come on, then!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He set his horse at the boulder-strewn slope and had to dismount to lead
+      him at the end of half a minute. At the end of a minute both he and the
+      messenger were hauling at the reins and the horse had grown frantic from
+      fear of falling backward. He shouted for help, and Ismail and another man
+      came leaping down, looking like the devils of the rocks, to lend their
+      strength. Ismail tightened his long girdle and stung the other two with
+      whiplash words, so that Darya Khan overcame prejudice to the point of
+      stowing his rifle between some rocks and lending a hand. Then it took all
+      four of them fifteen minutes to heave and haul the struggling animal to
+      the level road above.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There, with eyes long grown used to the dark, King stared about him,
+      recovering his breath and feeling in his pockets for a fresh cheroot and
+      matches. He struck a match and watched it to be sure his hand did not
+      shake before he spoke, because one of Cocker's rules is that a man must
+      command himself before trying it on others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where are the others?&rdquo; he asked, when he was certain of himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gone!&rdquo; boomed Ismail, still panting, for he had heaved and dragged more
+      stoutly than had all the rest together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King took a dozen pulls at the cheroot and stared about again. In the
+      middle of the road stood his second horse, and three mules with his
+      baggage, including the unmarked medicine chest. Close to them were three
+      men, making the party now only six all told, including Darya Khan, himself
+      and Ismail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gone whither?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whither?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail's voice was eloquent of shocked surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They followed! Was it then thy baggage on the other mules? Were they thy
+      men? They led the mules and went!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who ordered them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Allah! Need the night be ordered to follow the Day?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who told them whither to go?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who told the moon where the night was?&rdquo; Ismail answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And thou?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am thy man! She bade me be thy man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And these?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Try them!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King bethought him of his wrist, that was heavy with the weight of gold on
+      it. He drew back his sleeve and held it up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May God be with thee!&rdquo; boomed all five men at once, and the Khyber night
+      gave back their voices, like the echoing of a well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King took his reins and mounted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What now?&rdquo; asked Ismail, picking up the leather bag that he regarded as
+      his own particular charge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forward!&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;Come along!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to set a fairly fast pace, Ismail leading the spare horse and the
+      others towing the mules along. Except for King, who was modern and out of
+      the picture, they looked like Old Testament patriarchs, hurrying out of
+      Egypt, as depicted in the illustrated Bibles of a generation ago--all
+      leaning forward--each man carrying a staff--and none looking to
+      the right or left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a time the moon rose and looked at them from over a distant ridge
+      that was thousands of feet higher than the ragged fringe of Khyber wall.
+      The little mangy jackals threw up their heads to howl at it; and after
+      that there was pale light diffused along the track, and they could see so
+      well that King set a faster pace, and they breathed hard in the effort to
+      keep up. He did not draw rein until it was nearly time for the Pass to
+      begin narrowing and humping upward to the narrow gut at Ali Masjid. But
+      then he halted suddenly. The jackals had ceased howling, and the very
+      spirit of the Khyber seemed to hold its breath and listen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In that shuddersome ravine unusual sounds will rattle along sometimes from
+      wall to wall and gully to gully, multiplying as they go, until night grows
+      full of thunder. So it was now that they heard a staccato cannonade--not
+      very loud yet, but so quick, so pulsating, so filling to the ears that he
+      could judge nothing about the sound at all, except that whatever caused it
+      must be round a corner out of sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first, for a few minutes King suspected it was Rewa Gunga's mare,
+      galloping over hard rock away ahead of him. Then he knew it was a horse
+      approaching. After that he became nearly sure he was mistaken altogether
+      and that the drums were being beaten at a village--until he
+      remembered there was no village near enough and no drums in any case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the behavior of the horse he rode, and of the led one and the
+      mules, that announced at last beyond all question that a horse was coming
+      down the Khyber in a hurry. One of the mules brayed until the whole gorge
+      echoed with the insult, and a man hit him hard on the nose to silence him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King legged his horse into the shadow of a great rock. And after
+      shepherding the men and mules into another shadow, Ismail came and held
+      his stirrup, with the leather bag in the other hand. The bag fascinated
+      him, because he did not know what was in it, and it was plain that he
+      meant to cling to it until death or King should put an end to curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King drew his pistol. Ismail drew in his breath with a hissing sound, as
+      if he and not King were the marksman. King notched the foresight against
+      the corner of a crag, at a height that ought to be an inch or two above an
+      oncoming horse's ears, and Ismail nodded sagely. Whoever now should gallop
+      round that rock would be obliged to cross the line of fire. Such are the
+      vagaries of the Khyber's night echoes that it was a long five minutes yet
+      before a man appeared at last, riding like the night wind, on a horse that
+      seemed to be very nearly on his last legs. The beast was going wildly,
+      sobbing, with straggled ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Instead of speaking, King spurred out of the shadow and blocked the
+      oncoming horseman's way, making his own horse meet the other shoulder to
+      breast, knocking most of the remaining wind out of him. At risk of his own
+      life, Ismail seized the man's reins. The sparks flew, and there was a
+      growled oath; but the long and the short of it was that the rider squinted
+      uncomfortably down the barrel of King's repeating pistol.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give an account of yourself!&rdquo; commanded King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man did not answer. He was a jezailchi of the Khyber Rifles--hook-nosed
+      as an osprey--black-bearded--with white teeth glistening out of
+      a gap in the darkness of his lower face. And he was armed with a British
+      government rifle, although that is no criterion in that borderland of
+      professional thieves where many a man has offered himself for enlistment
+      with a stolen government rifle in his grasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The waler he rode was an officer's charger. The poor brute sobbed and
+      heaved and sweated in his tracks as his rightful owner surely had never
+      made him do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whither?&rdquo; King demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jamrud!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The jezailchi growled the one-word answer with one eye on King, but the
+      other eye still squinted down the pistol barrel warily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you a letter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man did not answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You may speak to me. I am of your regiment. I am Captain King.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is a lie, and a poor one!&rdquo; the fellow answered. &ldquo;But a very little
+      while ago I spoke with King sahib in Ali Masjid Fort, and he is no
+      cappitin, he is leftnant. Therefore thou art a liar twice over--nay,
+      three times! Thou art no officer of Khyber Rifles! I am a jezailchi, and I
+      know them all!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None the less,&rdquo; said King, &ldquo;I am an officer of the Khyber Rifles, newly
+      appointed. I asked you, have you a letter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me see it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I order you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay! I am a true man! I will eat the letter rather!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me who wrote it, then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the fellow shook his head, still eying the pistol as if it were a
+      snake about to strike.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have eaten the salt!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;May dogs eat me if I break faith! Who
+      art thou, to ask me to break faith? An arrficer? That must be a lie! The
+      letter is from him who wrote it, to whom I bear it--and that is my
+      answer if I die this minute!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King let his reins fall and raised his left wrist until the moonlight
+      glinted on the gold of his bracelet under the jezailchi's very eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May God be with thee!&rdquo; said the man at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From whom is your letter, and to whom?&rdquo; asked King, wondering what the
+      men in the clubs at home would say if they knew that a woman's bracelet
+      could outweigh authority on British sod; for the Khyber Pass is as much
+      British as the air is an eagle's or Korea Japanese, or Panama United
+      States American, and the Khyber jezailchis are paid to help keep it so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From the karnal sahib (colonel) at Landi Kotal, whose horse I ride,&rdquo; said
+      the jezailchi slowly, &ldquo;to the arrficer at Jamrud. To King sahib, the
+      arrficer at Ali Masjid I bore a letter also, and left it as I passed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Had they no spare horse at Ali Masjid? That beast is foundered.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are two horses there, and both lame. The man who thou sayest is thy
+      brother is heavy on horses.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King nodded. &ldquo;What is in the letter?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay! Have I eyes that can see through paper?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou hast ears that can listen!&rdquo; answered King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the letter that I left at Ali Masjid there is news of the lashkar that
+      is gathering in the 'Hills,' above Ali Masjid and beyond Khinjan. King
+      sahib is ordered to be awake and wary.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And to lame no more horses jumping them over rocks!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, the karnal sahib said he is to ride after no more jackals with a
+      spear!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Same old game!&rdquo; said King to himself. &ldquo;What knowest thou of the lashkar
+      that is gathering?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I? Oh, a little. An uncle of mine, and three half-brothers, and a brother
+      are of its number! One came at night to tempt me to join--but I have
+      eaten the salt. It was I who first warned our karnal sahib. Now, let me
+      by!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, wait!&rdquo; ordered King. But he lowered his pistol point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To hold up a despatch rider was about as irregular as any proceeding could
+      be; but it was within his province to find out how far the Khyber
+      jezailchis could be trusted and within his power more than to make up the
+      lost time. So that the irregularity did not trouble him much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does this other letter tell of the lashkar, too?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I God, that I should know? But of what else should the karnal sahib
+      write?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the object of the rising?&rdquo; King asked him next; and the man threw
+      his head back to laugh like a wolf. Laughter, at night in the Khyber, is
+      an insult. Ismail chattered into his beard; but King sat still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Object? What but to force the Khyber and burst through into India and
+      loot? What but to plunder, now that English backs are turned the other
+      way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who said their backs are turned?&rdquo; demanded King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ho! Hear him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Khyber echoed the mockery away and away into the distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Their backs are this way and their faces that! The kites know it! The
+      vultures know it! The little jackals know it! The little butchas in the
+      valley villages all know it! Ask the rocks, and the grass--the very
+      water running from the 'Hills'! They all know that the English fight for
+      life!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the Khyber jezailchis? What of them?&rdquo; King asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They know it better than any!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They make ready, even as I.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For what Allah shall decide! We ate the salt, we jezailchis. We chose,
+      and we ate of our own free will. We have been paid the price we named, in
+      silver and rifles and clothing. The arrficers the sirkar sent us are men
+      of faith who have made no trouble with our women. What, then, should the
+      Khyber jezailchis do? For a little while there will be fighting--or,
+      if we be very brave and our arrficers skillful, and Allah would fain see
+      sport, then for a longer while. Then we shall be overridden. Then the
+      Khyber will be a roaring river of men pouring into India, as my father's
+      father told me it has often been! India shall bleed in these days--but
+      there will be fighting in the Khyber first!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what of her? Of Yasmini?&rdquo; King asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou wearest that--and askest what of her? Nay--tell!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Should she order the jezailchis to be false to the salt--?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Such a question!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man clucked into his beard and began to fidget in the saddle. King
+      gave him another view of the bracelet, and again he found a civil answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We of the Rifles have her leave to be loyal to the salt, for, said she,
+      otherwise how could we be true men; and she loves no liars. From the
+      first, when she first won our hearts in the 'Hills,' she gave us of the
+      Rifles leave to be true men first and her servants afterward! We may love
+      her--as we do!--and yet fight against her, if so Allah wills--and
+      she will yet love us!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is she?&rdquo; King asked him suddenly, and the man began to laugh again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me by!&rdquo; he shouted truculently. &ldquo;Who am I to sit a horse and gossip
+      in the Khyber? Let me by, I say!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will let you by when you have told me where she is!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I die here, and very likely thou, too!&rdquo; the man answered, bringing
+      his rifle to the port in front of him so quickly that he almost had King
+      at a disadvantage. As it was, King was quick enough to balance matters by
+      covering him with the pistol again. The horses sensed excitement and began
+      to stir. With a laugh the jezailchi let the rifle fall across his lap, and
+      at that King put the pistol out of sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fool!&rdquo; hissed Ismail in his ear; but King knows the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; better in
+      some ways than the savages who live in them; they, for instance, never
+      seem able to judge whether there will be a fight presently or not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why won't you tell me where she is?&rdquo; he asked in his friendliest voice,
+      and that would wheedle secrets from the Sphynx.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her secrets are her own, and may Allah help her guard them! I will tear
+      my tongue out first!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Enviable woman!&rdquo; murmured King. &ldquo;Pass, friend!&rdquo; he ordered, reining
+      aside. &ldquo;Take my spare horse and leave me that weary one, so you will
+      recover the lost time and more into the bargain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man changed horses gladly, saying nothing. When he had shifted the
+      saddle and mounted, he began to ride off with a great air, not so much as
+      deigning to scowl at Ismail. But he had not ridden a dozen paces when he
+      sat round in the saddle and drew rein.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sahib!&rdquo; he called. &ldquo;Sahib!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King waited. He had waited for this very thing and could afford to wait a
+      minute longer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hast thou--is there--does the sahib--I have not tasted--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made a sign with his hand that men recognize in pretty nearly every
+      land under the sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So-ho!&rdquo; laughed King, patting his hip pocket, from which the cap of a
+      silver-topped flask had been protruding ever since he put the pistol out
+      of sight. &ldquo;So our copper's hot, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May Allah do more to me if my throat is not lined with the fires of
+      Eblis!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the Kalamullah!&rdquo; King objected. &ldquo;What saith the Prophet?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Prophet forbade the faithful to drink wine,&rdquo; said the jezailchi. &ldquo;He
+      said nothing about whiskey, that I ever heard!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mine is brandy,&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May Allah bless the sahib's sons and grandsons to the seventh generation!
+      May Allah--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me about Yasmini first! Where is she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King tapped the flask in his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay! My throat is dry, but it shalt parch! I know not! As to where she
+      is, I know not!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Remember, and I will give you the whole of it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew the flask out of his pocket and rode a little way toward the man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None can overhear. Tell me now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, sahib! I am silent!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you passed her on your way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man shook his head--shook it until the whites of his eyes were a
+      streak in the middle of his dark face; and when a Hillman is as vehement
+      as that he is surely lying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King set the flask to his own lips and drank a few drops.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Salaam, sahib!&rdquo; said the jezaitchi, wheeling his horse to ride away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King let him ride twenty paces before calling to him to halt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come back!&rdquo; he ordered, and rode part of the way to meet him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I but tried thee, friend!&rdquo; he said, holding out the flask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Allah then preserve me from a second test!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The jezailchi seized the flask, clapped it to his lips and drained it to
+      the last drop while King sat still in the moonlight and smiled at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God grant the giver peace!&rdquo; he prayed, handing the flask back. The kindly
+      East possesses no word for &ldquo;Thank you.&rdquo; Then he wheeled the horse in a
+      sudden eddy, as polo ponies turn on the Indian plains, and rode away down
+      the wind as if the Pass were full of devils in pursuit of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King watched him out of sight and then listened until the hoof-beats died
+      away and the Pass grew still again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The jezailchis'll stand!&rdquo; he said, lighting a new cheroot. &ldquo;Good men and
+      good luck to 'em!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he rode back to his own men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where starts the trail to Khinjan?&rdquo; he asked; not that he had forgotten
+      it, but to learn who knew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This side of Ali Masjid!&rdquo; they answered all together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two miles this side. More than a mile from here,&rdquo; said Ismail. &ldquo;What
+      next? Shall we camp here? Here is fuel and a little water. Give the word--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay-forward!&rdquo; ordered King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forward?&rdquo; growled Ismail. &ldquo;With this man it is ever 'forward!' Is there
+      neither rest nor fear? Has she bewitched him? Hai! Ye lazy ones! Ho! Sons
+      of sloth! Urge the mules faster! Beat the led horse!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So in weird wan moonlight, King led them forward, straight up the
+      narrowing gorge, between cliffs that seemed to fray the very bosom of the
+      sky. He smoked a cigar and stared at the view, as if he were off to the
+      mountains for a month's sport with dependable shikarris whom he knew.
+      Nobody could have looked at him and guessed he was not enjoying himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That man,&rdquo; mumbled Ismail behind him, &ldquo;is not as other sahibs I have
+      known. He is a man, this one! He will do unexpected things!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forward!&rdquo; King called to them, thinking they were grumbling. &ldquo;Forward,
+      men of the 'Hills'!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter VII
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     The owl he has eyes that are big for his size,
+     And the night like a book he deciphers;
+     &ldquo;Too-woop!&rdquo; he asserts, and &ldquo;Hoo-woo-ip!&rdquo; he cries,
+     And he means to remark he is awfully wise;
+     But he lags behind us, who are &ldquo;on&rdquo; to the lies
+     Of the hairy Himalayan knifers!
+
+     For eyes we be, of Empire, we,
+     Skinned and puckered and quick to see,
+     And nobody guesses how wise we be,
+     Nor hidden in what disguise we be,
+     A-cooking a sudden surprise we be
+     For hairy Himahlyan knifers!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      After a time King urged his horse to a jog-trot, and the five Hillmen
+      pattered in his wake, huddled so close together that the horse could
+      easily have kicked more than one of them. The night was cold enough to
+      make flesh creep; but it was imagination that herded them until they
+      touched the horse's rump and kept the whites of their eyes ever showing as
+      they glanced to left and right. The Khyber, fouled by memory, looks like
+      the very birthplace of the ghosts when the moon is fitful and a mist
+      begins to flow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheloh!&rdquo; King called merrily enough; but his horse shied at nothing,
+      because horses have an uncanny way of knowing how their riders really
+      feel. They led mules and the spare horse, instead of dragging at their
+      bridles, pressed forward to have their heads among the men, and every once
+      and again there would sound the dull thump of a fist on a beast's nose--such
+      being the attitude of men toward the lesser beasts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They trotted forward until the bed of the Khyber began to grow very
+      narrow, and Ali Masjid Fort could not be much more than a mile away, at
+      the widest guess. Then King drew rein and dismounted, for he would have
+      been challenged had he ridden much farther. A challenge in the Khyber
+      after dark consists invariably of a volley at short range, with the mere
+      words afterward, and the wise man takes precaution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Off with the mules' packs!&rdquo; he ordered, and the men stood round and
+      stared. Darya Khan, leaning on the only rifle in the party, grinned like a
+      post-office letter box.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Truly,&rdquo; growled Ismail, forgetting past expression of a different
+      opinion, &ldquo;this man is as mad as all the other Englishmen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Were you ever bitten by one?&rdquo; wondered King aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God forbid!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, off with the packs--and hurry!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail began to obey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou! Lord of the Rivers! (For that is what Darya Khan means.) What is
+      thy calling?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Badragga&rdquo; (guide), he answered. &ldquo;Did she not send me back down the Pass
+      to be a guide?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And before that what wast thou?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that thy business?&rdquo; he snarled, shifting his rifle-barrel to the other
+      hand. &ldquo;I am what she says I am! She used to call me 'Chikki'--the
+      Lifter!--and I was! There are those who were made to know it! If she
+      says now I am badragga, shall any say she lies?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say thou art unpacker of mules' burdens!&rdquo; answered King. &ldquo;Begin!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For answer the fellow grinned from ear to ear and thrust the rifle-barrel
+      forward insolently. King, with the movement of determination that a man
+      makes when about to force conclusions, drew up his sleeves above the
+      wrist. At that instant the moon shone through the mist and the gold
+      bracelet glittered in the moonlight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May God be with thee!&rdquo; said &ldquo;Lord of the Rivers&rdquo; at once. And without
+      another word he laid down his rifle and went to help off-load the mules.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King stepped aside and cursed softly. To a man who knows how to enforce
+      his own authority, it is worse than galling to be obeyed because he wears
+      a woman's favor. But for a vein of wisdom that underlay his pride he would
+      have pocketed the bracelet there and then and have refused to wear it
+      again. But as he sweated his pride he overheard Ismail growl:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good for thee! He had taught thee obedience in another bat of the eye!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I obey her!&rdquo; muttered Darya Khan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I, too,&rdquo; said Ishmail. &ldquo;So shall he before the week dies! But now it is
+      good to obey him. He is an ugly man to disobey!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I obey him until she sets me free, then,&rdquo; grumbled Darya Khan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better for thee!&rdquo; said Ismail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The packs were laid on the ground, and the mules shook themselves, while
+      the jackals that haunt the Khyber came closer, to sit in a ring and watch.
+      King dug a flashlight out of one of the packs, gave it to Ismail to hold,
+      sat on the other pack and began to write on a memorandum pad. It was a
+      minute before he could persuade Ismail that the flashlight was harmless,
+      and another minute before he could get him to hold it still. Then,
+      however, he wrote swiftly.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;In the Khyber, a mile below you.
+
+        &ldquo;Dear Old Man--I would like to run in and see you, but
+        circumstances don't permit.  Several people sent you
+        their regards by me.  Herewith go two mules and their
+        packs.  Make any use of the mules you like, but store
+        the loads where I can draw on them in case of need.
+        I would like to have a talk with you before taking the
+        rather desperate step I intend, but I don't want to be
+        seen entering or leaving Ali Masjid.  Can you come
+        down the Pass without making your intention known?
+        It is growing misty now.  It ought to be easy.  My men
+        will tell you where I am and show you the way.  Why
+        not destroy this letter?
+
+        &ldquo;Athelstan.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      He folded the note and stuck a postage stamp on it in lieu of seal. Then
+      he examined the packs with the aid of the flashlight, sorted them and
+      ordered two of the mules reloaded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You three!&rdquo; he ordered then. &ldquo;Take the loaded mules into Ali Masjid Fort.
+      Take this chit, you. Give it to the sahib in command there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They stood and gaped at him, wide-eyed--then came closer to see his
+      eyes and to catch any whisper that Ismail might have for them. But Ismail
+      and Darya Khan seemed full of having been chosen to stay behind; they
+      offered no suggestions--certainly no encouragement to mutiny.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To hear is to obey!&rdquo; said the nearest man, seizing the note, for at all
+      events that was the easiest task. His action decided the other two. They
+      took the mules' leading-reins and followed him. Before they had gone ten
+      paces they were all swallowed in the mist that had begun to flow
+      southeastward; it closed on them like a blanket, and in a minute more the
+      clink of shod hooves had ceased. The night grew still, except for the
+      whimpering of jackals. Ismail came nearer and squatted at King's feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, sahib?&rdquo; he asked: and Darya Khan came closer, too. King had tied the
+      reins of the two horses and the one remaining mule together in a knot and
+      was sitting on the pack.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo; he countered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Solemn, almost motionless, squatted on their hunkers, they looked like two
+      great vultures watching an animal die.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have they done that they should be sent away?&rdquo; asked Ismail. &ldquo;What
+      have they done that they should be sent to the fort, where the arrficer
+      will put them in irons?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should he put them in irons?&rdquo; asked King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not? Here in the Khyber there is often a price on men's heads!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And not in Delhi?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Delhi these were not known. There were no witnesses in Delhi. In the
+      fort at Ali Masjid there will be a dozen ready to swear to them!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, why did they obey?&rdquo; asked King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is that on the sahib's wrist?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean--?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sahib--if she said, 'Walk into the fire or over that Cliff!' there
+      be many in these 'Hills' who would obey without murmuring!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have nothing against them,&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;As long as they are my men I
+      will not send them into a trap.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; nodded Ismail and Darya Khan together, but they did not seem
+      really satisfied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is good,&rdquo; said Ismail, &ldquo;that she should have nothing against thee,
+      sahib! Those three men are in thy keeping!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I in thine?&rdquo; King asked, but neither man answered him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They sat in silence for five minutes. Then suddenly the two Hillmen
+      shuddered, although King did not bat an eyelid. Din burst into being. A
+      volley ripped out of the night and thundered down the Pass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How-utt! Hukkums dar?&rdquo; came the insolent challenge half a minute after it--the
+      proof positive that Ali Masjid's guards neither slept nor were afraid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A weird wail answered the challenge, and there began a tossing to and fro
+      of words, that was prelude to a shouted invitation:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ud-vance-frrrennen-orsss-werrul!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      English can be as weirdly distorted as wire, or any other supple medium,
+      and native levies advance distortion to the point of art; but the language
+      sounds no less good in the chilly gloom of a Khyber night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Followed another wait, this time of half an hour. Then a man's footsteps--a
+      booted, leather-heeled man, striding carelessly. Not far behind him was
+      the softer noise of sandals. The man began to whistle Annie Laurie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Charles? That you?&rdquo; called King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That you, old man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A man in khaki stepped into the moonlight. He was so nearly the image of
+      Athelstan King that Ismail and Darya Khan stood up and stared. Athelstan
+      strode to meet him. Their walk was the same. Angle for angle, line for
+      line, they might have been one man and his shadow, except for
+      three-quarters of an inch of stature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Glad to see you, old man,&rdquo; said Athelstan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sure, old chap!&rdquo; said Charles; and they shook hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the desperate proposal?&rdquo; asked the younger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll tell you when we are alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His brother nodded and stood a step aside. The three who had taken the
+      note to the fort came closer--partly to call attention to themselves,
+      partly to claim credit, partly because the outer silence frightened them.
+      They elbowed Ismail and Darya Khan, and one of them received a savage blow
+      in the stomach by way of retort from Ismail. Before that spark could start
+      an explosion Athelstan interfered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ismail! Take two men. Go down the Pass out of ear-shot, and keep watch!
+      Come back when I whistle thus--but no sooner!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put fingers between his teeth and blew until the night shrilled back at
+      him. Ismail seized the leather bag and started to obey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave that bag. Leave it, I say!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But some man may steal it, sahib. How shall a thief know there is no
+      money in it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave it and go!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail departed, grumbling, and King turned on Darya Khan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take the remaining man, and go up the Pass!&rdquo; he ordered. &ldquo;Stand out of
+      ear-shot and keep watch. Come when I whistle!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But this one has a belly ache where Ismail smote him! Can a man with a
+      belly ache stand guard? His moaning will betray both him and me!&rdquo; objected
+      &ldquo;Lord of the Rivers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take him and go!&rdquo; commanded King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King was careful now not to show his bracelet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there was something in his eye and in his attitude--a subtle
+      suggestive something-or-other about him--that was rather more
+      convincing than a pistol or a stick. Darya Khan thrust his rifle-end into
+      the hurt man's stomach for encouragement and started off into the mist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come and ache out of the sahibs' sight!&rdquo; he snarled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a minute King and his brother stood unseen, unheard in the shadow by a
+      patch of silver moonlight. Athelstan sat down on the mule's pack.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; said the younger. &ldquo;Tell me. I shall have to hurry. You see I'm in
+      charge back there. They saw me come out, but I hope to teach 'em a lesson
+      going back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Athelstan nodded. &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I've a roving commission. I'm ordered
+      to enter Khinjan Caves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His brother whistled. &ldquo;Tall order! What's your plan?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Haven't one--yet. Know more when I'm nearer Khinjan. You can help no
+      end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How? Name it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall go up in disguise. Nobody can put the stain on as well as you.
+      But tell me something first. Any news of a holy war yet?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His brother nodded. &ldquo;Plenty of talk about one to come,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;We keep
+      hearing of that lashkar that we can't locate, under a mullah whose name
+      seems to change with the day of the week. And there are everlasting tales
+      about the 'Heart of the Hills.&rdquo;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No explanation of 'em?&rdquo; Athelstan asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None! Not a thing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;D'you know of Yasmini?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heard of her of course,&rdquo; said his brother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has she come up the Pass?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His brother laughed. &ldquo;No, neither she nor a coach and four.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have heard the contrary,&rdquo; said Athelstan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heard what, exactly?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's up the Pass ahead of me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She hasn't passed Ali Masjid!&rdquo; said his brother, and Athelstan nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are the Turks in the show yet?&rdquo; asked Charles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not yet. But I know they're expected in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You bet they're expected in!&rdquo; The younger man grinned from ear to ear.
+      &ldquo;They're working both tides under to prepare the tribes for it. They
+      flatter themselves they can set alight a holy war that will put Timour
+      Ilang to shame. You should hear my jezailchies talk at night when they
+      think I'm not listening!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The jezailchies'll stand though,&rdquo; said Athelstan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stake my life on it!&rdquo; said his brother. &ldquo;They'll stick to the last man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't tell you,&rdquo; said Athelstan, &ldquo;why we're not attacking brother Turk
+      before he's ready. I imagine Whitehall has its hands full. But it's likely
+      enough that the Turk will throw in his lot with the Prussians the minute
+      he's ready to begin. Meanwhile my job is to help make the holy war seem
+      unprofitable to the tribes, so that they'll let the Turk down hard when he
+      calls on 'em. Every day that I can point to forts held strongly in the
+      Khyber is a day in my favor. There are sure to be raids. In fact, the more
+      the merrier, provided they're spasmodic. We must keep 'em separated--keep
+      'em from swarming too fast--while I sow other seeds among 'em.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His brother nodded. Sowing seeds was almost that family's hereditary job.
+      Athelstan continued:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hang on to Ali Masjid like a leech, old man! The day one raiding lashkar
+      gets command of the Khyber's throat, the others'll all believe they've won
+      the game. Nothing'll stop 'em then! Look out for traps. Smash 'em on
+      sight. But don't follow up too far!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sure,&rdquo; said Charles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Help me with the stain now, will you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With his flash-light burning as if its battery provided current by the
+      week instead of by the minute, Athelstan dragged open the mule's pack and
+      produced a host of things. He propped a mirror against the pack and
+      squatted in front of it. Then he passed a little bottle to his brother,
+      and Charles attended to the chin-strap mark that would have betrayed him a
+      British officer in any light brighter than dusk. In a few minutes his
+      whole face was darkened to one hue, and Charles stepped back to look at
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won't need to wash yourself for a month!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;The dirt won't show!&rdquo;
+       He sniffed at the bottle. &ldquo;But that stain won't come off if you do wash--never
+      worry! You'll do finely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not yet, I won't!&rdquo; said Athelstan, picking up a little safety razor and
+      beginning on his mustache. In a minute he had his upper lip bare. Then his
+      brother bent over him and rubbed in stain where the scrubby mustache had
+      been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that Athelstan unlocked the leather bag that had caused Ismail so
+      much concern and shook out from it a pile of odds and ends at which his
+      brother nodded with perfect understanding. The principal item was a piece
+      of silk--forty or fifty yards of it--that he proceeded to bind
+      into a turban on his head, his brother lending him a guiding,
+      understanding finger at every other turn. When that was done, the man who
+      had said he looked in the least like a British officer would have lied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One after another he drew on native garments, picking them from the pile
+      beside him. So, by rapid stages he developed into a native hakim--by
+      creed a converted Hindu, like Rewa Gunga,--one of the men who
+      practise yunani, or modern medicine, without a license and with a very
+      great deal of added superstition, trickery and guesswork.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wouldn't trust you with a ha'penny!&rdquo; announced his brother when he had
+      done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really? As good as all that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The part to a T.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well--take these into the fort for me, will you?&rdquo; His brother caught
+      the bundle of discarded European clothes and tucked them under his arm.
+      &ldquo;Now, re-member, old man! This is the biggest show there has ever been!
+      We've got to hold the Khyber, and we can't do it by riding pell-mell into
+      the first trap set for us! We must smash when the fighting starts--but
+      we mayn't miss! We mayn't run past the mark! Be a coward, if that's the
+      name you care to give it. You needn't tell me you've got orders to hunt
+      skirmishers to a standstill, because I know better. I know you've just had
+      your wig pulled for laming two horses!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How d'you know that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never mind! I've been seconded to your crowd. I'm your senior, and I'm
+      giving you orders. This show isn't sport, but the real red thing, and I
+      want to count on you to fight like a trained man, not like a natural-born
+      fool. I want to know you're holding Ali Masjid like Fabius held Rome, by
+      being slow and wily, just for the sake of the comfortable feeling it will
+      give me when I'm alone among the 'Hills.' Hit hard when you have to, but
+      for God's sake, old man, ware traps!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said his brother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then good-by, old man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-by, Athelstan!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They stood facing and shook hands. Where had been a man and his reflection
+      in the mist, there now seemed to be the same man and a native. Athelstan
+      King had changed his very nature with his clothes. He stood like a native--moved
+      like one; even his voice was changed, as if--like the actor who dyed
+      himself all over to act Othello--he could do nothing by halves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going to try to get in without my men seeing me!&rdquo; said the younger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If they do see you, they'll shoot!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, and miss! Trust a Khyber jezailchi not to hit much in the dark!
+      It'll do 'em good either way. I'll have time to give 'em the password
+      before they fire a second volley. They're not really dangerous till the
+      third one. Good-by!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By, Charles!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Officers in that force are not chosen for their clumsiness, or inability
+      to move silently by night. His foot-steps died in the mist almost as
+      quickly as his shadow. Before he had been gone a minute the Pass was
+      silent as death again, and though Athelstan listened with trained ears,
+      the only sound he could detect was of a jackal cracking a bone fifty or
+      sixty yards away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He repacked the loads, putting everything back carefully into the big
+      leather envelopes and locking the empty hand-bag, after throwing in a few
+      stones for Ismail's benefit. Then he went to sit in the moonlight, with
+      his back to a great rock and waited there cross-legged to give his brother
+      time to make good a retreat through the mist. When there was no more doubt
+      that his own men, at all events, had failed to detect the lieutenant, he
+      put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Almost at once he heard sandals come pattering from both directions. As
+      they emerged out of the mist he sat silent and still. It was Darya Khan
+      who came first and stood gaping at him, but Ismail was a very close
+      second, and the other three were only a little behind. For full two
+      minutes after the man with the sore stomach had come they all stood
+      holding one another's arms, astonished. Then--
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is he?&rdquo; asked Ismail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who?&rdquo; said King, the hakim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our sahib--King sahib--where is he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gone!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Even his voice was so completely changed that men who had been reared amid
+      mutual suspicion could not recognize it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there are his loads! There is his mule!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is his bag!&rdquo; said Ismail, pouncing on it, picking it up and shaking
+      it. &ldquo;It rattles not as formerly! There is more in it than there was!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His two horses and the mule are here,&rdquo; said Darya Khan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did I say he took them with him?&rdquo; asked the hakim, who sat still with his
+      back to a rock. &ldquo;He went because I came! He left me here in charge! Should
+      he not leave the wherewithal to make me comfortable, since I must do his
+      work? Hah! What do I see? A man bent nearly double? That means a belly
+      ache! Who should have a belly ache when I have potions, lotions, balms to
+      heal all ills, magic charms and talismans, big and little pills--and
+      at such a little price! So small a price! Show me the belly and pay your
+      money! Forget not the money, for nothing is free except air, water and the
+      Word of God! I have paid money for water before now, and where is the
+      mullah who will not take a fee? Nay, only air costs nothing! For a rupee,
+      then--for one rupee I will heal the sore belly and forget to be
+      ashamed for taking such a little fee!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whither went the sahib? Nay--show us proof!&rdquo; objected Darya Khan;
+      and Ismail stood back a pace to scratch his flowing beard and think.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sahib left this with me!&rdquo; said King, and held up his wrist. The gold
+      bracelet Rewa Gunga had given him gleamed in the pale moonlight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May God be with thee!&rdquo; boomed all five men together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King jumped to his feet so suddenly that all five gave way in front of
+      him, and Darya Khan brought his rifle to the port.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hast thou never seen me before?&rdquo; he demanded, seizing Ismail by the
+      shoulders and staring straight into his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, I never saw thee!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look again!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned his head, to show his face in profile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, I never saw thee!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou, then! Thou with the belly! Thou! Thou!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They all denied ever having seen him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he stepped back until the moon shone full in his face and pulled off
+      his turban, changing his expression at the same time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now look!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ma'uzbillah! (May God protect us!)&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now ye know me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hee-yee-yee!&rdquo; yelled Ismail, hugging himself by the elbows and beginning
+      to dance from side to side. &ldquo;Hee-yee-yee! What said I? Said I not so? Said
+      I not this is a different man? Said I not this is a good one--a man
+      of unexpected things? Said I not there was magic in the leather bag? I
+      shook it often, and the magic grew! Hee-yee-yee! Look at him! See such
+      cunning! Feel him! Smell of him! He is a good one--good!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Three of the others stood and grinned, now that their first shock of
+      surprise had died away. The fourth man poked among the packs. There was
+      little to see except gleaming teeth and the whites of eyes, set in hairy
+      faces in the mist. But Ismail danced all by himself among the stones of
+      Khyber road and he looked like a bearded ghoul out for an airing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hee-yee-yee! She smelt out a good one! Hee-yee-yee! This is a man after
+      my heart! Hee-yee-yee! God preserve me! God preserve me to see the end of
+      this! This one will show sport! Oh-yee-yee-yee!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly he closed with King and hugged him until the stout ribs cracked
+      and bent inward and King sobbed for breath among the strands of the
+      Afridi's beard. He had to use knuckles and knees and feet to win freedom,
+      and though he used them with all his might and hurt the old savage
+      fiercely, he made no impression on his good will.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After my own heart, thou art! Spirit of a cunning one! Worker of spells!
+      Allah! That was a good day when she bade me wait for thee!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King sat down again, panting. He wanted time to get his breath back and a
+      little of the ache out of his ribs, but he did not care to waste any more
+      minutes, and his eyes watched the faces of the other four men. He saw them
+      slowly waken to understanding of what Ismail meant by &ldquo;worker of spells&rdquo;
+       and &ldquo;magic in the bag&rdquo; and knew that he had even greater hold on them now
+      than Yasmini's bracelet gave him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ma'uzbillah!&rdquo; they murmured as Ismail's meaning dawned and they
+      recognized a magician in their midst. &ldquo;May God protect us!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May God protect me! I have need of it!&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;What shall my new
+      name be? Give ye me a name!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, choose thou!&rdquo; urged Ismail, drawing nearer. &ldquo;We have seen one
+      miracle; now let us hear another!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well. Khan is a title of respect. Since I wish for respect, I will
+      call myself Khan. Name me a village the first name you can think of--quick!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kurram,&rdquo; said Ismail, at a hazard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kurram is good. Kurram I am! Kurram Khan is my name henceforward! Kurram
+      Khan the dakitar!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But where is the sahib who came from the fort to talk?&rdquo; asked the man
+      whose stomach ached yet from Ismail and Darya Khan's attentions to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gone!&rdquo; announced King. &ldquo;He went with the other one!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Went whither? Did any see him go?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that thy affair?&rdquo; asked King, and the man collapsed. It is not
+      considered wise to the north of Jamrud to argue with a wizard, or even
+      with a man who only claims to be one. This was a man who had changed his
+      very nature almost under their eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even his other clothes have gone!&rdquo; murmured one man, he who had poked
+      about among the packs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now, Ismail, Darya Khan, ye two dunder-heads!--ye bellies
+      without brains!--when was there ever a dakitar--a hakim, who had
+      not two assistants at the least? Have ye never seen, ye blinder-than-bats--how
+      one man holds a patient while his boils are lanced, and yet another makes
+      the hot iron ready?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye! Aye!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They had both seen that often.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, what are ye?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They gaped at him. Were they to work wonders too? Were they to be part and
+      parcel of the miracle? Watching them, King saw understanding dawn behind
+      Ismail's eyes and knew he was winning more than a mere admirer. He knew it
+      might be days yet, might be weeks before the truth was out, but it seemed
+      to him that Ismail was at heart his friend. And there are no friendships
+      stronger than those formed in the Khyber and beyond--no more loyal
+      partnerships. The &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; are the home of contrasts, of blood-feuds that
+      last until the last-but-one man dies, and of friendships that no crime or
+      need or slander can efface. If the feuds are to be avoided like the devil,
+      the friendships are worth having.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is another thing ye might do,&rdquo; he suggested, &ldquo;if ye two grown men
+      are afraid to see a boil slit open. Always there are timid patients who
+      hang back and refuse to drink the medicines. There should be one or two
+      among the crowd who will come forward and swallow the draughts eagerly, in
+      proof that no harm results. Be ye two they!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail spat savagely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay! Bismillah! Nay, nay! I will hold them who have boils, sitting firmly
+      on their bellies--so--or between their shoulders--thus--when
+      the boils are behind! Nay, I will drink no draughts! I am a man, not a
+      cess-pool!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I will study how to heat hot irons!&rdquo; said Darya Khan, with grim
+      conviction. &ldquo;It is likely that, having worked for a blacksmith once, I may
+      learn quickly! Phaughghgh! I have tasted physic! I have drunk Apsin Saats!
+      (Epsom Salts.)&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spat, too, in a very fury of reminiscence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;Henceforward, then, I am Kurram Khan, the dakitar, and
+      ye two are my assistants, Ismail to hold the men with boils, and Darya
+      Khan to heat the irons--both of ye to be my men and support me with
+      words when need be!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo; said Ismail, quick to think of details, &ldquo;and these others shall be
+      the tasters! They have big bellies, that will hold many potions without
+      crowding. Let them swallow a little of each medicine in the chest now, for
+      the sake of practise! Let them learn not to make a wry face when the taste
+      of cess-pools rests on the tongue--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye, and the breath comes sobbing through the nose!&rdquo; said Darya Khan,
+      remembering fragments of an adventurous career. &ldquo;Let them learn to drink
+      Apsin Saats without coughing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will not drink the medicines!&rdquo; announced the man who had a stomach
+      ache. &ldquo;Nay, nay!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Ismail hit him with the back of his hand in the stomach again and
+      danced away, hugging himself and shouting &ldquo;Hee-yee-yee!&rdquo; until the jackals
+      joined him in discontented chorus and the Khyber Pass became full of weird
+      howling. Then suddenly the old Afridi thought of something else and came
+      back to thrust his face close to King's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why be a Rangar? Why be a Rajput, sahib? She loves us Hillmen better!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do I look like a Hillman of the 'Hills'?&rdquo; asked King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, not now. But he who can work one miracle can work another. Change
+      thy skin once more and be a true Hillman!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo; King laughed. &ldquo;And fall heir to a blood-feud with every second man
+      I chance upon! A Hill-man is cousin to a hundred others, and what say they
+      in the 'Hills'?--'to hate like cousins,' eh? All cousins are at war.
+      As a Rangar I have left my cousins down in India. Better be a converted
+      Hindu and be despised by some than have cousins in the 'Hills'! Besides--do
+      I speak like a Hillman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye! Never an Afridi spake his own tongue better!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet--does a Hillman slip? Would a Hillman use Punjabi words in a
+      careless moment?&rdquo;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God forbid!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Therefore, thou dunderhead, I will be a Rangar Rajput,--a stranger
+      in a strange land, traveling by her favor to visit her in Khinjan! Thus,
+      should I happen to make mistakes in speech or action, it may be
+      overlooked, and each man will unwittingly be my advocate, explaining away
+      my errors to himself and others instead of my enemy denouncing me to all
+      and sundry! Is that clear, thou oaf?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye! Thou art more cunning than any man I ever met!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The great Afridi began to rub the tips of his fingers through his straggly
+      beard in a way that might mean anything, and King seemed to draw
+      considerable satisfaction from it, as if it were a sign language that he
+      understood. More than any one thing in the world just then he needed a
+      friend, and he certainly did not propose to refuse such a useful one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And,&rdquo; he added, as if it were an afterthought, instead of his chief
+      reason, &ldquo;if her special man Rewa Gunga is a Rangar, and is known as a
+      Rangar through out the 'Hills,' shall I not the more likely win favor by
+      being a Rangar too? If I wear her bracelet and at the same time am a
+      Rangar, who will not trust me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;True! Thou art a magician!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;True!&rdquo; agreed Ismail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the moon was getting low and Khyber would be dark again in half an
+      hour, for the great crags in the distance to either hand shut off more
+      light than do the Khyber walls. The mist, too, was growing thicker. It was
+      time to make a move.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King rose. &ldquo;Pack the mule and bring my horse!&rdquo; he ordered and they hurried
+      to obey with alacrity born of new respect, Darya Khan attending to the
+      trimming of the mule's load in person instead of snarling at another man.
+      It was a very different little escort from the one that had come thus far.
+      Like King himself, it had changed its very nature in fifteen minutes!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They brought the horse, and King laughed at them, calling the idiots--men
+      without eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The saddle?&rdquo; Ismail suggested. &ldquo;It is a government arrficer's saddle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stolen!&rdquo; said King, and they nodded. &ldquo;Stolen along with the horse!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then the bridle?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stolen too, ye men without eyes! Ye insects! A stolen horse and saddle
+      and bridle, are they not a passport of gentility this side of the border?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am Kurram Khan, the dakitar, but who in the 'Hills' would believe it?
+      Look now--look ye and tell me what is wrong?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He pointed to the horse, and they stood in a row and stared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shorten those stirrups, then, six holes at the least! Men will laugh at
+      me if I ride like a British arrficer!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo; said Ismail, hurrying to obey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye! Aye! Aye!&rdquo; agreed the others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; he said, gathering the reins and swinging into the saddle, &ldquo;who
+      knows the way to Khinjan?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which of us does not!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ye all know it? Then ye all are border thieves and worse! No honest man
+      knows that road! Lead on, Darya Khan, thou Lord of Rivers! Do thy duty as
+      badragga and beware lest we get our knees wet at the fords! Ismail, you
+      march next. Now I. You other two and the mule follow me. Let the man with
+      the belly ache ride last on the other horse. So! Forward march!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So Darya Khan led the way with his rifle, and King's face glowed in
+      cigarette light not very far behind him as he legged his horse up the
+      narrow track that led northward out of the Khyber bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be a long time before he would dare smoke a cigar again, and his
+      supply of cigarettes was destined to dwindle down to nothing before that
+      day. But he did not seem to mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheloh!&rdquo; he called. &ldquo;Forward, men of the mountains! Kuch dar nahin hai!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thy mother and the spirit of a fight were one!&rdquo; swore Ismail just in
+      front of him, stepping out like a boy going to a picnic. &ldquo;She will love
+      thee! Allah! She will love thee! Allah! Allah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The thought seemed to appal him. For hours after that he climbed ahead in
+      silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter VIII
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Dear is the swagger that takes a man in
+             Helmeted, clattering, proud.
+     Sweet are the honors the arrogant win,
+             Hot from the breath of a crowd.
+     Precious the spirit that never will bend--
+             Hot challenge for insolent stare!
+     But--talk when you've tried it!--to win in the end,
+     Go ahsti!*  Be meek!  And beware!
+
+     [* Slowly.]
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Even with the man with the stomach ache mounted on the spare horse for the
+      sake of extra speed (and he was not suffering one-fifth so much as he
+      pretended); with Ismail to urge, and King to coax, and the fear of
+      mountain death on every side of them, they were the part of a night and a
+      day and a night and a part of another day in reaching Khinjan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Darya Khan, with the rifle held in both hands, led the way swiftly, but
+      warily; and the last man's eyes looked ever backward, for many a sneaking
+      enemy might have seen them and have judged a stern chase worth while.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; the hunter has all the best of it, and the hunted needs
+      must run. The accepted rule is to stalk one's enemy relentlessly and get
+      him first. King happened to be hunting, although not for human life, and
+      he felt bold, but the men with him dreaded each upstanding crag, that
+      might conceal a rifleman. Armed men behind corners mean only one thing in
+      the &ldquo;Hills.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The animals grew weary to the verge of dropping, for the &ldquo;road&rdquo; had been
+      made for the most part by mountain freshets, and where that was not the
+      case it was imaginary altogether. They traveled upward, along ledges that
+      were age-worn in the limestone--downward where the &ldquo;hell-stones&rdquo; slid
+      from under them to almost bottomless ravines, and a false step would have
+      been instant death--up again between big edged boulders, that nipped
+      the mule's pack and let the mule between--past many and many a lonely
+      cairn that hid the bones of a murdered man (buried to keep his ghost from
+      making trouble)--ever with a tortured ridge of rock for sky-line and
+      generally leaning against a wind, that chilled them to the bone, while the
+      fierce sun burned them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At night and at noon they slept fitfully at the chance-met shrine of some
+      holy man. The &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; are full of them, marked by fluttering rags that can
+      be seen for miles away; and though the Quran's meaning must be stretched
+      to find excuse, the Hillmen are adept at stretching things and hold those
+      shrines as sacred as the Book itself. Men who would almost rather cut
+      throats than gamble regard them as sanctuaries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When a man says he is holy he can find few in the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; to believe him;
+      but when he dies or is tortured to death or shot, even the men who
+      murdered him will come and revere his grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whole villages leave their preciousest possessions at a shrine before
+      wandering in search of summer pasture. They find them safe on their
+      return, although the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; are the home of the lightest-fingered thieves
+      on earth, who are prouder of villainy than of virtue. A man with a
+      blood-feud, and his foe hard after him, may sleep in safety at a faquir's
+      grave. His foe will wait within range, but he will not draw trigger until
+      the grave is left behind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So a man may rest in temporary peace even on the road to Khinjan, although
+      Khinjan and peace have nothing whatever in common.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was at such a shrine, surrounded by tattered rags tied to sticks, that
+      fluttered in the wind three or four thousand feet above Khyber level, that
+      King drew Ismail into conversation, and deftly forced on him the role of
+      questioner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can'st thou see the Caves!&rdquo; he asked, for King had hinted at his
+      intention; and for answer King gave him a glimpse of the gold bracelet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye! Well and good! But even she dare not disobey the rule. Khinjan was
+      there before she came, and the rule was there from the beginning, when the
+      first men found the Caves! Some--hundreds--have gained
+      admission, lacking the right. But who ever saw them again? Allah! I, for
+      one, would not chance it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou and I are two men!&rdquo; answered King. &ldquo;Allah gave thee qualities I
+      lack. He gave thee the strength of a bull and a mountain goat in one, and
+      her for a mistress. To me he gave other qualities. I shall see the Caves.
+      I am not afraid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye! He gave thee other gifts indeed! But listen! How many Indian
+      servants of the British Raj have set out to see the Caves? Many, many--aye,
+      very many! Again and again the sirkar sent its loyal ones. Did any return?
+      Not one! Some were crucified before they reached the place. One died
+      slowly on the very rock whereon we sit, with his eyelids missing and his
+      eyes turned to the sun! Some entered Khinjan, and the women of the place
+      made sport with them. Those would rather have been crucified outside had
+      they but known. Some, having got by Khinjan, entered the Caves. None ever
+      came out again!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, what is my case to thee?&rdquo; King asked him &ldquo;If I can not come out
+      again and there is a secret then the secret will be kept, and what is the
+      trouble?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I love thee,&rdquo; the Afridi answered simply. &ldquo;Thou art a man after mine own
+      heart. Turn! Go back before it is too late!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be warned!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail reached out a hairy-backed hand that shook with half-suppressed
+      emotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When we reach Khinjan, and I come within reach of her orders again, then
+      I am her man, not thine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King smiled, glancing again at the gold bracelet on his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I look like her man, too!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou!&rdquo; Ismail's scorn was well feigned if it was not real. &ldquo;Thou chicken
+      running to the hand that will pluck thy breast-feathers! Listen!
+      Abdurrahman--he of Khabul--and may Allah give his ugly bones no
+      peace!--Abdurrahman of Khabul sought the secret of the Caves. He sent
+      his men to set an ambush. They caught twenty coming out of Khinjan on a
+      raid. The twenty were carried to Khabul and put to torture there. How
+      many, think you, told the secret under torture? They died cursing
+      Abdurrahman to his face and he died without the secret! May God recompense
+      him with the fire that burns forever and scalding water and ashes to eat!
+      May rats eat his bones!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Had Abdurrahman this?&rdquo; asked King, touching the bracelet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay! He would have given one eye for it, but none would trade with him!
+      He knew of it, but never saw it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am more favored. I have it. It is hers, is it not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does not she know the secret?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She knows all that any man knows and more!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was she seen to slay a man in the teeth of written law?&rdquo; asked King, and
+      Ismail stared so hard at him that he laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was in Khinjan once before, my friend! I know the rule! I failed to
+      reach the Caves that other time because I had no witnesses to swear they
+      had seen me slay a man in the teeth of written law. I know!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who saw thee this time?&rdquo; Ismail asked, and began to cackle with the cruel
+      humor of the &ldquo;Hills,&rdquo; that sees amusement in a man's undoing, or in the
+      destruction of his plans. His humor forced him to explain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The price of an entrance has come of late to be the life of an English
+      arrficer! Many an one the English have dubbed Ghazi, because he crossed
+      the border and buried his knife in a man on church parade! They hang and
+      burn them, knowing our Muslim law, that denies Heaven to him who is hanged
+      and burned. Yet the man they miscall ghazi sought but the key to Khinjan
+      Caves, with no thought at all about Heaven! Thou art a British arrficer.
+      It may be they will let thee enter the Caves at her bidding. It may be,
+      too, that they will keep thee in a cage there for some chief's son to try
+      his knife on when the time comes to win admission! Listen--man o' my
+      heart!--so strict is the rule that boys born in the Caves, when they
+      come to manhood, must go and slay an Englishman and earn outlawry before
+      they may come back; and lest they prove fearful and betray the secret, ten
+      men follow each. They die by the hand of one or other of the ten unless
+      they have slain their man within two weeks. So the secret has been kept
+      more years than ten men can remember!&rdquo; (That estimate was doubtless due to
+      a respect for figures and bore no relation to the length of a human
+      generation.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whom did she kill to gain admission?&rdquo; King asked him unexpectedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ask her!&rdquo; said Ismail. &ldquo;It is her business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And thou? Was the life of a British officer the price paid?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay. I slew a mullah.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The calmness of the admission, and the satisfaction that its memory seemed
+      to bring the owner made King laugh. He found lawless satisfaction for
+      himself in that Ismail's blood-price should have been a priest, not one of
+      his brother officers. A man does not follow King's profession for health,
+      profit or sentiment's sake, but healthy sentiment remains. The loyalty
+      that drives him, and is its own most great reward, makes him a man to the
+      middle. He liked Ismail. He could not have liked him in the same way if he
+      had known him guilty of English blood, which is only proof, of course,
+      that sentiment and common justice are not one. But sentiment remains.
+      Justice is an ideal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be warned and go back!&rdquo; urged Ismail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come with me, then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, I am her man. She waits for me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I imagine she waits for me!&rdquo; laughed King. &ldquo;Forward! We have rested in
+      this place long enough!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So on they went, climbing and descending the naked ramparts that lead
+      eastward and upward and northward to the Roof of Mother Earth--Ismail
+      ever grumbling into his long beard, and King consumed by a fiercer
+      enthusiasm than ever had yet burned in him,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forward! Forward! Cast hounds forward! Forward in any event!&rdquo; says
+      Cocker. It is only regular generals in command of troops in the field who
+      must keep their rear open for retreat. The Secret Service thinks only of
+      the goal ahead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was ten of a blazing forenoon, and the sun had heated up the rocks
+      until it was pain to walk on them and agony to sit, when they topped the
+      last escarpment and came in sight of Khinjan's walls, across a mile-wide
+      rock ravine--Khinjan the unregenerate, that has no other human
+      habitation within a march because none dare build.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They stood on a ridge and leaned against the wind. Beneath them a path
+      like a rope ladder descended in zigzags to the valley that is Khinjan's
+      dry moat; it needed courage as well as imagination to believe that the
+      animals could be guided down it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there no other way?&rdquo; asked King. He knew well of one other, but one
+      does not tell all one knows in the &ldquo;Hills,&rdquo; and there might have been a
+      third way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None from this side,&rdquo; said Ismail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And on the other side?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a rather better path--that by which the sirkar's troops
+      once came--although it has been greatly obstructed since. It is two
+      days' march from here to reach it. Be warned a last time, sahib--little
+      hakim--be warned and go back!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou bird of ill omen!&rdquo; laughed King. &ldquo;Must thou croak from every rock we
+      rest on?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I were a bird I would fly away back with thee!&rdquo; said Ismail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forward, since we can not fly--forward and downward!&rdquo; King answered.
+      &ldquo;She must have crossed this valley. Therefore there are things worth while
+      beyond! Forward!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The animals, weary to death anyhow, fell rather that walked down the
+      track. The men sat and scrambled. And the heat rose up to meet them from
+      the waterless ravine as if its floor were Tophet's lid and the devil busy
+      under it, stoking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was midday when at last they stood on bottom and swayed like men in a
+      dream fingering their bruises and scarcely able for the heat haze to see
+      the tangled mass of stone towers and mud-and-stone walls that faced them,
+      a mile away. Nobody challenged them yet. Khinjan itself seemed dead,
+      crackled in the heat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sahib, let us mount the hill again and wait for night and a cool breeze!&rdquo;
+       urged Darya Khan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail clucked into his beard and spat to wet his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This glare makes my eyes ache!&rdquo; he grumbled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait, sahib! Wait a while!&rdquo; urged the others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forward!&rdquo; ordered King. &ldquo;This must be Tophet. Know ye not that none come
+      out of Tophet by the way they entered in? Forward! The exit is beyond!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They staggered after him, sheltering their eyes and faces from the glare
+      with turban-ends and odds and ends of clothing. The animals swayed behind
+      them with hung heads and drooping ears, and neither man nor beast had
+      sense enough left to have detected an ambush. They were more than half-way
+      across the valley, hunting for shadow where none was to be found, when a
+      shotted salute brought them up all-standing in a cluster. Six or eight
+      nickel-coated bullets spattered on the rocks close by, and one so narrowly
+      missed King that he could feel its wind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Up went all their hands together, and they held them so until they ached.
+      Nothing whatever happened. Their arms ceased aching and grew numb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forward!&rdquo; ordered King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After another quarter of a mile of stumbling among hot boulders, not one
+      of which was big enough to afford cover, or shelter from the sun, another
+      volley whistled over them. Their hands went up again, and this time King
+      could see turbaned heads above a parapet in front. But nothing further
+      happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forward!&rdquo; he ordered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They advanced another two hundred yards and a third volley rattled among
+      the rocks on either hand, frightening one of the mules so that it stumbled
+      and fell and had to be helped up again. When that was done, and the mule
+      stood trembling, they all faced the wall. But they were too weary to hold
+      their hands up any more. Thirst had begun to exercise its sway. One of the
+      men was half delirious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who are ye?&rdquo; howled a human being, whose voice was so like a wolf's that
+      the words at first had no meaning. He peered over the parapet, a hundred
+      feet above, with his head so swathed in dirty linen that he looked like a
+      bandaged corpse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What will ye? Who comes uninvited into Khinjan?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King bethought him of Yasmini's talisman. He, held it up, and the gold
+      band glinted in the sun. Yet, although a Hillman's eyes are keener than an
+      eagle's, he did not believe the thing could be recognized at that angle,
+      and from that distance. Another thought suggested itself to him. He turned
+      his head and caught Ismail in the act of signaling with both hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ye may come!&rdquo; howled the watchman on the parapet, disappearing instantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King trembled--perhaps as a racehorse trembles at the starting gate,
+      though he was weary enough to tremble from fatigue. The &ldquo;Hills,&rdquo; that numb
+      the hearts of many men, had not cowed him, for he loved them and in love
+      there is no fear. Heat and cold and hunger were all in the day's work;
+      thirst was an incident; and the whistle of lead in the wind had never
+      meant more to him than work ahead to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But a greyhound trembles in the leash. A boiler, trembles when word goes
+      down the speaking-tube from the bridge for &ldquo;all she's got.&rdquo; And so the
+      mild-looking hakim Kurram Khan, walking gingerly across hot rocks, donning
+      cheap, imitation shell-rimmed spectacles to help him look the part,
+      trembled even more than the leg-weary horse he led.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But that passed. He was all in hand when he led his men up over a rough
+      stone causeway to a door in the bottom of a high battlemented wall and
+      waited for somebody to open it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great teak door looked as if it had been stolen from some Hindu
+      temple, and he wondered how and when they could have brought it there
+      across those savage intervening miles. With its six-inch teak planks and
+      bronze bolts its weight must be guessed at in tons--yet a horse can
+      hardly carry a man along any of the trails that lead to Khinjan!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wood bore the marks of siege and fracture and repair. The walls were
+      new-built, of age-old stone. The last expedition out of India had leveled
+      every bit of those defenses flat with the valley, but Khinjan's devils had
+      reerected them, as ants rebuild a rifled nest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door was swung open after a time, pulled by a rope, manipulated from
+      above by unseen hands. Inside was another blind wall, twenty feet behind
+      the first. To the right a low barricade blocked the passage and provided a
+      safe vantage point from which it could be swept by a hail of lead; but to
+      the left a path ran unobstructed for more than a hundred yards between the
+      walls, to where the way was blocked by another teak door, set in
+      unscalable black rock. High above the door was a ledge of rock that
+      crossed like a bridge from wall to wall, with a parapet of stone built
+      upon it, pierced for rifle-fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As they approached this second door a Rangar turban, not unlike King's
+      own, appeared above the parapet on the ledge and a voice he recognized
+      hailed him good-humoredly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Salaam aleikoum!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And upon thee be peace!&rdquo; King answered in the Pashtu tongue, for the
+      &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; are polite, whatever the other principles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rewa Gunga's face beamed down on him, wreathed in smiles that seemed to
+      include mockery as well as triumph. Looking up at him at an angle that
+      made his neck ache and dazzled his eyes, King could not be sure, but it
+      seemed to him that the smile said, &ldquo;Here you are, my man, and aren't you
+      in for it?&rdquo; He more than half suspected he was intended to understand
+      that. But the Rangar's conversation took another line.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By jove!&rdquo; he chuckled. &ldquo;She expected you. She guessed you are a hound who
+      can hunt well on a dry scent, and she dared bet you will come in spite of
+      all odds! But she didn't expect you in Rangar dress! No, by jove! You
+      jolly well will take the wind out of her sails!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King made no answer. For one thing, the word &ldquo;hound,&rdquo; even in English, is
+      not essentially a compliment. But he had a better reason than that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you find the way easily?&rdquo; the Rangar asked but King kept silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is he parched? Have they cut his tongue out on the road?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That question was in Pashtu, directed at Ismail and the others, but King
+      answered it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, as for that,&rdquo; he said, salaaming again in the fastidious manner of a
+      native gentleman, &ldquo;I know no other tongue than Pashtu and my own
+      Rajasthani. My name is Kurram Khan. I ask admittance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He held up his wrist to show the gold bracelet, and high over his head the
+      Rangar laughed like a bell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shabash!&rdquo; he laughed. &ldquo;Well done! Enter, Kurram Khan, and be welcome,
+      thou and thy men. Be welcome in her name!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Somebody pulled a rope and the door yawned wide, giving on a kind of
+      courtyard whose high walls allowed no view of anything but hot blue sky.
+      King hurried under the arch and looked up, but on the courtyard side of
+      the door the wall rose sheer and blank, and there was no sign of window or
+      stairs, or of any means of reaching the ledge from which the Rangar had
+      addressed him. What he did see, as he faced that way, was that each of his
+      men salaamed low and covered his face with both hands as he entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whom do ye salute?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail stared back at him almost insolently, as one who would rebuke a
+      fool.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is this not her nest these days?&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;It is well to bow low.
+      She is not as other women. She is she! See yonder!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Through a gap under an arch in a far corner of the courtyard came a
+      one-eyed, lean-looking villain in Afridi dress who leaned on a long gun
+      and stared at them under his hand. After a leisurely consideration of them
+      he rubbed his nose slowly with one finger, spat contemptuously, and then
+      used the finger to beckon them, crooking it queerly and turning on his
+      heel. He did not say one word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King led the way after him on foot, for even in the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; where cruelty
+      is a virtue, a man may be excused, on economic grounds, for showing mercy
+      to his beast. His men tugged the weary animals along behind him, through
+      the gap under the arch and along an almost interminable, smelly maze of
+      alleys whose sides were the walls of square stone towers, or sometimes of
+      mud-and-stone-walled compounds, and here and there of sheer, slab-sided
+      cliff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At intervals they came to bolted narrow doors, that probably led up to
+      overhead defenses. Not fifty yards of any alley was straight; not a yard
+      but what was commanded from overhead. Khinjan had been rebuilt since its
+      last destruction by some expert who knew all about street fighting. Like
+      Old Jerusalem, the place could have contained a civil war of a hundred
+      factions, and still have opposed stout resistance to an outside army.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alley gave on to courtyard, and filthy square to alley, until unexpectedly
+      at last a seemingly blind passage turned sharply and opened on a straight
+      street, of fair width, and more than half a mile long. It is marked
+      &ldquo;Street of the Dwellings&rdquo; on the secret army maps, and it has been burned
+      so often by Khinjan rioters, as well as by expeditions out of India, that
+      a man who goes on a long journey never expects to find it the same on his
+      return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was lined on either hand with motley dwellings, out of which a motlier
+      crowd of people swarmed to stare at King and his men. There were houses
+      built of stolen corrugated iron--that cursed, hot, hideous stuff that the
+      West has inflicted on an all-too-willing East; others of wood--of
+      stone--of mud--of mats--of skins--even of tent-cloth. Most of
+      them were filthy. A row of kites sat on the roof of one, and in the gutter
+      near it three gorged vultures sat on the remains of a mule. Scarcely a
+      house was fit to be defended, for Khinjan's fighting men all possess
+      towers, that are plastered about the overfrowning mountain like wasp nests
+      on a wall. These were the sweepers, the traders, the loose women, the mere
+      penniless and the more or less useful men--not Khinjan's inner guard
+      by any means.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were Hindus--sycophants, keepers of accounts and writers to the
+      chiefs (since literacy is at premium in these parts). In proof of
+      Khinjan's catholic taste and indiscriminate villainy, there were women of
+      nearly every Indian breed and caste, many of them stolen into shameful
+      slavery, but some of them there from choice. And there were little
+      children--little naked brats with round drum tummies, who squealed
+      and shrilled and stared with bold eyes; some of them were pretending to be
+      bandits on their own account already, and one flung a stone that missed
+      King by an inch. The stone fell in the gutter on the far side and, started
+      a fight among the mangy street curs, which proved a diversion and probably
+      saved King's party from more accurate attentions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps a thousand souls came out to watch, all told. Not an eye of them
+      all missed the government marks on King's trappings, or the government
+      brand on the mules, and after a minute or two, when the procession was
+      half-way down the street, a man reproved the child who had thrown a stone,
+      and he was backed up by the others. They classified King correctly,
+      exactly as he meant they should. As a hakim--a man of medicine--he
+      could fill a long-felt want; but by the brand on his accouterments he
+      walked an openly avowed robber, and that made him a brother in crime.
+      Somebody cuffed the next child who picked up a stone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He knew the street of old, although it had changed perhaps a dozen times
+      since he had seen it. It was a cul-de-sac, and at the end of it, just as
+      on his previous visit, there stood a stone mosque, whose roof leaned back
+      at a steep angle against the mountain-side. The fact that it was a mosque,
+      and that it was the only building used as such in Khinjan, had saved it
+      from being leveled to the ground by the last British expedition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a famous mosque in its way, for the bed-sheet of the Prophet is
+      known to hang in it, preserved against the ravages of time and the touch
+      of infidels by priceless Afghan rugs before and behind, so that it hangs
+      like a great thin sandwich before the rear stone wall. King had seen it.
+      Very vividly he recalled his almost exposure by a suspicious mullah, when
+      he had crept nearer to examine it at close range. For the Secret Service
+      must probe all things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There had been an attempt since his last visit to make the mosque's
+      exterior look more in keeping with the building's use. It was cleaner. It
+      had been smeared with whitewash. A platform had been built on the roof for
+      the muezzin. But it still looked more like a fort than a place of worship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Toward it the one-eyed ruffian led the way, with the long,
+      leisurely-seeming gait of a mountaineer. At the door, in the middle of the
+      end of the street, he paused and struck on the lintel three times with his
+      gun-butt. And that was a strange proceeding, to say the least, in a land
+      where the mosque is public resting place for homeless ones, and all the
+      &ldquo;faithful&rdquo; have a right to enter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A mullah, shaven like a mummy for some unaccountable reason--even his
+      eyebrows and eyelashes had been removed--pushed his bare head through
+      the door and blinked at them. There was some whispering and more staring,
+      and at last the mullah turned his back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door slammed. The one-eyed guide grounded his gun-butt on the stone,
+      and the procession waited, watched by the crowd that had lost its interest
+      sufficiently to talk and joke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In two minutes the mullah returned and threw a mat over the threshold. It
+      turned out to be the end of a long narrow strip that he kicked and
+      unrolled in front of him all across the floor of the mosque. After that it
+      was not so astonishing that the horses and mules were allowed to enter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which proves I was right after all!&rdquo; murmured King to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a steel box at Simla is a memorandum, made after his former visit to
+      the place, to the effect that the entrance into Khinjan Caves might
+      possibly be inside the mosque. Nobody had believed it likely, and he had
+      not more than half favored it himself; but it is good, even when the next
+      step may lead into a death-trap, to see one's first opinions confirmed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded to himself as the outer door slammed shut behind them, for that
+      was another most unusual circumstance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A faint light shone through slit-like windows, changing darkness into
+      gloom, and little more than vaguely hinting at the Prophet's bed-sheet.
+      But for a section of white wall to either side of it, the relic might have
+      seemed part of the shadows. The mullah stood with his back to it and
+      beckoned King nearer. He approached until he could see the pattern on the
+      covering rugs, and the pink rims round the mullah's lashless eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is thy desire?&rdquo; the mullah asked--as a wolf might ask what a
+      lamb wants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Supposing Yasmini to be jealous of invasion of her realm, King did not
+      doubt she would be glad to have him break down at this point. Until he had
+      actually gained access to her, nobody could reasonably charge her with his
+      safety. If he had been done to death in the Khyber, the sirkar would have
+      known it in a matter of hours. If he were killed here they might never
+      know it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Answer!&rdquo; said the mullah. &ldquo;What is thy desire?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Audience with her!&rdquo; he answered, and showed the gold bracelet on his
+      wrist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The red eye-rims of the mullah blinked a time or two, and though he did
+      not salute the bracelet, as others had invariably done, his manner
+      underwent a perceptible change.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is proof that she knows thee. What is thy name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kurram Khan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And thy business?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hakim.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We need thee in Khinjan Caves! But none enter who have not earned right
+      to enter! There is but one key. Name it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King drew in his breath. He had hoped Yasmini's talisman would prove to be
+      key enough. The nails his left hand nearly pierced the palm, but he smiled
+      pleasantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He who would enter must slay a man before witnesses in the teeth of
+      written law!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And thou?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I slew an Englishman!&rdquo; The boast made his blood run cold, but his
+      expression was one of sinful pride.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whom? When? Where?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Athelstan King--a British arrficer--sent on his way to these
+      'Hills' to spy!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was like having spells cast on himself to order!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is his body?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ask the vultures! Ask the kites!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And thy witnesses?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hoping against hope, King turned and waved his hand. As he did so, being
+      quick-eyed, he saw Ismail drive an elbow home into Darya Khan's ribs, an
+      caught a quick interchange of whispers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These men are all known to me,&rdquo; said the mullah. &ldquo;They all have right to
+      enter here. They have right to testify. Did ye see him slay his man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo; lied Ismail, prompt as friend can be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo; lied Darya Khan, fearful of Ismail's elbow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, enter!&rdquo; said the priest resignedly, as one admits a communicant
+      against his better judgment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned his back on them so as to face the Prophet's bed-sheet and the
+      rear wall, and in that minute a hairy hand gripped King's arm from behind,
+      and Ismail's voice hissed hot-breathed in his ear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ready of tongue! Ready of wit! Who told thee I would lie to save thy
+      skin? Be thy kismet as thy courage, then--but I am hers, not thy man!
+      Hers, thou light of life--though God knows I love thee!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The mullah seized the Prophet's bed-sheet and its covering rugs in both
+      hands, with about as much reverence as salesmen show for what they keep in
+      stock. The whole lot slid to one side by means of noisy rings on a rod,
+      and a wall lay bare, built of crudely cut but very well laid stone blocks.
+      It appeared to reach unbroken across the whole width of the mosque's
+      interior.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the floor lay a mallet, a peculiar thing of bronze, cast in one piece,
+      handle and all. The mullah took it in his hand and struck the stone floor
+      sharply once--then twice again--then three times--then a
+      dozen times in quick succession. The floor rang hollow at that spot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After about a minute there came one answering hammer-stroke from beyond
+      the wall. Then the mullah laid the mallet down and though King ached to
+      pick it up and examine it he did not dare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Excitement now was probably the least of his emotions. It had been
+      swallowed in interest. But in his guise of hakim he had to beware of that
+      superficial western carelessness, that permits folk to acknowledge
+      themselves frightened or excited or amused. His business was to attract as
+      little attention to himself as possible; and to that end he folded his
+      hands and looked reverent, as if entering some Mecca of his dreams.
+      Through his horn-rimmed spectacles his eyes looked far-away and dreamy.
+      But it would have been a mistake to suppose that a detail was escaping
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The irregular lines in the masonry began to be more pronounced. All at
+      once the wall shook and they gaped by an inch or two, as happens when an
+      earthquake has shaken buildings without bringing anything down. Then an
+      irregular section of wall began to move quite smoothly away in front of
+      him, leaving a gap through which eight men abreast could have marched.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As it receded he observed that the lowest course stones was laid on a
+      bronze foundation, that keyed in wide bronze grooves. There was oil enough
+      in the grooves to have greased a ship's ways and there neither squeak nor
+      tremor as the tons of masonry slid back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the end of perhaps three minutes that section of the wall had become
+      the fourth side of a twenty-foot-wide island that stood fair in the middle
+      of a tunnel, splitting it in two to right and left. Judging by the angle
+      of the two divisions they became one again before going very far.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mullah stood aside and motioned King to enter. But the one-eyed guide
+      who had led them to the mosque thrust himself between Darya Khan and
+      Ismail, pushed King aside and took the lead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I am responsible to her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the first time he had spoken and he appeared to resent the waste of
+      words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tunnel that led to the left was pierced in twenty places in the roof
+      for rifle-fire; a score of men with enough ammunition could have held it
+      forever against an army. But the right-hand way looked undefended.
+      Nevertheless, the guide led to the left, and King followed him, filled
+      with curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Many have entered!&rdquo; sang the lashless mullah in a sing-song chant. &ldquo;More
+      have sought to enter! Some who remained without were wisest! I count them!
+      I keep count! Many went in! Not all came out again by this road!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then there is another road?&rdquo; King wondered, but he held his tongue and
+      followed the guide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It proved to be fifty yards through part natural, part hand-hewn, tunnel
+      to the neck of the fork where the left- and right-hand passages
+      became one again. He stopped at the fork and looked back, for none of his
+      men was following.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He caught the sound of scuffling of clattering hoofs, and grunts and
+      shouted oaths--and started to run back, since even a native hakim may
+      protect his own, should he care to, even in the &ldquo;Hills.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For the sake of principle he chose the other passage, for Cocker says,
+      &ldquo;Look! Look! Look!&rdquo; But the guide seized him by the arm from behind and
+      swung him back again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not that way!&rdquo; he growled. But he offered no explanation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; it is not good to ask &ldquo;why&rdquo; of strangers. It is good to be
+      glad one was not knifed, and to be deferent until more suitable occasion.
+      King started to run again, but this time along the same defended passage
+      down which they had come. And now the guide made no objection but leaned
+      on his long gun and waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The charger proved to be making the trouble--the horse that King had
+      exchanged with the jezailchi in the Khyber. The terrified brute was
+      refusing to enter the passage, and all the men, including Ismail and the
+      mullah, were shoving, or else tugging at the reins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the moment King appeared the united strength of six men was beginning
+      to prevail. The mullah let go the reins, and in that instant the horse saw
+      King advance toward him out of the tunnel; so, after the manner of horses,
+      he chose the other passage. King ran at full speed round the corner after
+      him, remembering that the guide had admitted responsibility, and therefore
+      that the chances were he would be rescued should he run into a trap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly, ten yards in the lead down the dark tunnel the horse threw his
+      weight back with a clatter of sparks and screamed as only a horse can.
+      After that there was neither sight nor sound of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Creeping forward with both arms outstretched against the left-hand wall,
+      he reached the spot where, the horse had been, and shuddered on the smooth
+      dark edge of a hole that went the full width of the floor. There came
+      whispering up out of it, and a dank wet smell, as if there were running
+      water a mile away below. He could feel that a little air flowed downward
+      into it. Twenty yards away on the far side the path resumed, but there was
+      neither hand nor foothold on the smooth damp walls between. He went back
+      to his men with a shiver between his shoulder-blades, and the mullah,
+      standing in the gap of the mosque wall, blinked at him with lashless eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Many have entered,&rdquo; he chanted maliciously. &ldquo;Some went out by a different
+      road!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; Ismail growled at the other men, seizing the mule's bridle himself
+      and leading to the left. &ldquo;The ghosts will have a charger now for their
+      captain to ride! Lead on, Hakim sahib!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; called the one-eyed guide from the neck of the fork ahead. And as
+      they all pressed forward after King the hairless mullah gave a signal and
+      the great stone door slid slowly into place. It was like a tombstone. It
+      was as if the world that mortals know were a thing of the forgotten past
+      and the underworld lay ahead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lead along, Charon!&rdquo; King grinned. He needed some sort of pleasantry to
+      steady his nerves. But even so he wondered what the nerves of India would
+      be like if her millions knew of this place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter IX
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Oh, Abdul trod with a martial tread,
+     Swinging his scimiter's weight.
+     &ldquo;I am overlord here,&rdquo; he said,
+     &ldquo;And he who wishes may chance his head,
+     &ldquo;For my blade is long, and my arm is strong,
+     &ldquo;And the goods of the world to the bold belong!&rdquo;
+      So Abdul guarded the gate.
+
+     Many a head did Abdul cleave,
+     Turban and crown and chin,
+     For all the 'venturers sought to know
+     What it could be he guarded so.
+     And since none give but eke receive,
+     A thrust in his ribs made Abdul grieve
+     For good blood outpourin'.
+
+     His men wept, watching Abdul bleed
+     And life's light waning dim,
+     Till he cursed them. &ldquo;Open the fort gate wide!
+     To saddle, and scour the countryside
+     For a leech!&rdquo; he swore.  &ldquo;God rot ye, ride!&rdquo;
+      'Twas thus, in the guise of a friend in need,
+     His enemy came to him.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The second gap closed up behind them and the tunnel began to echo weirdly.
+      The mule was the next to be panic-stricken. The noise of his plunging
+      increased the echoes a thousand times and multiplied his fright, until the
+      poor brute collapsed into meek obedience at last. But the guide strode on
+      unconcerned with his easy Hillman gait, neither deigning to glance back
+      nor making any verbal comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Over their heads, at irregular intervals, there were holes that if they
+      led as King presumed into caves above, left not an inch of all the long
+      passage that could not have been swept by rifle-fire. It was impregnable;
+      for no artillery heavy enough to pound the mountain into pieces could ever
+      be dragged within range. Whatever hiding place this entrance guarded could
+      be held forever, given food and cartridges!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tunnel wound to right and left like a snake, growing lighter and
+      lighter after each bend; and soon their own din began to be swallowed in a
+      greater one that entered from the farther end. After two sharp turns they
+      came out unexpectedly into the blaze of blue day, nearly stunned by light
+      and sound. A road came up from below like that of an ocean in the grip of
+      a typhoon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When his wits recovered from the shock, King struggled with a wild desire
+      to yell, for before him, was what no servant of British India had ever
+      seen and lived to tell about, and that is an experience more potent than
+      unbroken rum.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had emerged from a round-mouthed tunnel--it looked already like
+      a rabbit-hole, so huge was the cliff behind--on to a ledge of rock
+      that formed a sort of road along one side of a mile-wide chasm. Above him,
+      it seemed a mile up, was blue sky, to which limestone walls ran sheer,
+      with scarcely a foothold that could be seen. Beneath, so deep that eyes
+      could not guess how deep, yawned the stained gorge of the underworld,
+      many-colored, smooth and wet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And out of a great, jagged slit in the side of the cliff, perhaps a
+      thousand feet below them, there poured down into thunderous dimness a
+      waterfall whose breadth seemed not less than half a mile. It spouted
+      seventy or eighty yards before it began to curve, and its din was like the
+      voice of all creation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail came and stood by King in silence, taking his hand, as a little
+      child might. Presently he stooped and picked up a stone and tossed it
+      over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gone!&rdquo; he said simply. &ldquo;That down there is Earth's Drink!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And this is the 'Heart of the Hills' men boast about?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay! It is not!&rdquo; snapped Ismail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, where--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the one-eyed guide beckoned impatiently, and King led the way after
+      him, staring as hakim or prisoner or any man had right to do on first
+      admission to such wonders. Not to have stared would have been to proclaim
+      himself an idiot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The least of all the wonders was that the secret of the place should have
+      been kept all down the centuries; for it was the hollow middle of a
+      limestone mountain, that could neither be looked down into from above,
+      because the heights were not scalable, nor guessed at from the
+      conformation of the country. The river, that flowed out of rock and went
+      plunging down into the chasm, must be snow from the Himalayan peaks, on
+      its way to swell the sea. There was no other way to account for that; but
+      that explanation did explain why at least one Indian river is no greater
+      than it is.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The road they followed was a fold in the natural rock, rising and falling
+      and curving like a ribbon, but tending on the average downward. It looked
+      to be about two miles to the point where it curved at the chasm's end and
+      swept round and downward, to be lost in a fissure in the cliff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They soon began to pass the mouths of caves. Some were above the road, now
+      and then at crazy heights above it, reached by artificial steps hewn out
+      of the stone. Others were below, reached from the road by means of
+      ladders, that trembled and swayed over the dizzying waterfall. Most of the
+      caves were inhabited, for armed men and sullen women came to their
+      entrances to stare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ears grow accustomed to the sound of water sooner than to almost anything.
+      It was not long before King's ears could catch the patter of his men's
+      feet following, and the shod clink of the mule. He could hear when Ismail
+      whispered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be brave, little hakim! She loves fearless men.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As the track descended caves became more numerous. In one there were
+      horses, for as they passed there came a whiff of unclean stables, and the
+      litter of fodder and dung was all about the entrance. The mouths of other
+      caves were sealed, with great wax disks, strangely stamped, affixed to
+      stout wooden doors. One cave smelt as if oil were stored in it, and King
+      wondered whence the oil was brought--for the sirkar knows to a pint
+      and an ounce what products travel up and down the Khyber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last the guide halted, in the middle of a short steep slope where the
+      path was less than six feet wide and a narrow cave mouth gave directly on
+      to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be content to rest here!&rdquo; he said, pointing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thy cave?&rdquo; asked King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay. God's! I am the caretaker!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (The &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; are very pious and polite, between the acts of robbing and
+      shedding blood.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Allah, then, reward thee, brother!&rdquo; answered King. &ldquo;Allah give sight to
+      thy blind eye! Allah give thee children! Allah give thee peace, and to all
+      thy house!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The guide salaamed, half-mockingly, half-wondering at such eloquence,
+      pausing in the passage to point into the side-caves that debouched to
+      either hand. There was a niche of a place, where a man might lie on guard
+      near the entrance; another cave in which horses could be stabled, with
+      plenty of fodder piled up ready; another beyond that for servants and
+      baggage, with a fireplace and cooking pots; and at the last at the rear of
+      all a great cavern full of eerie gloom, that opened out from the end of
+      the passage like a bottle at the end of a long neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peering about him into vastness, King became aware of frame beds, placed
+      at intervals in a row, each with a mat beside it. And there were several
+      brass basins and ewers for water. Also there were some little bronze
+      lamps; the guide lit three of them, and King took up one to examine it. As
+      he did so, involuntarily his hand almost went to his bosom, where the
+      strange knife still reposed that he had taken from the would-be murderer
+      in the train to Delhi.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no gold on the lamp; but the handle by which he lifted it had
+      been cast, the devils of the Himalayas only knew how many centuries ago,
+      in the form of a woman dancing; her size, and her shape, and the art with
+      which she had been fashioned, were the same as the handle of the knife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Watching him as a wolf eyes another one, the strange guide found his
+      tongue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How many such hast thou ever seen?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None!&rdquo; answered King, and the guide cackled at him, like a hen that has
+      laid an egg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There be many strange things in Khinjan, but few strangers!&rdquo; he remarked;
+      and then, as if that were enough for any man to say on any occasion, he
+      turned on his heel and stalked out of the cavern. It was the last King
+      ever saw of him. He followed him down the passage to the entrance and
+      watched him until his back disappeared round the first bend, but the man
+      never turned his head once. He did not even look over the edge of the
+      road, down into the amazing waterfall, nor up to the round disk of sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King turned back and looked into the other caves--saw the weary horse
+      and mule fed, watered and bedded down--took note of the running water
+      that rushed out of a rock fissure and gurgled out of sight down another
+      one--examined the servants' cave and saw that they had been amply
+      provided with blankets. There was nothing lacking that the most exacting
+      traveler could have demanded at such a distance from civilization. There
+      was more than the most exacting would have dared expect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why isn't it damp in here?&rdquo; he wondered, returning to his own cave. And
+      then he noticed long fissures in the cavern walls, and that the smoke from
+      the lamps drifted toward them. He could not guess what made it do that,
+      unless it were the suction of the enormous river hurrying underground; and
+      then he remembered that at the entrance air had rushed downward into the
+      hole down which the horse had disappeared, which partly confirmed his
+      guess.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ismail!&rdquo; he shouted, and jumped at the revolver-crack--like echo of
+      his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail came running.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make the men carry the mule's packs into this cave. You and Darya Khan
+      stay here and help me open them. Remember, ye are both assistants of
+      Kurram Khan, the hakim!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They will laugh at us! They will laugh at us!&rdquo; clucked Ismail, but he
+      hurried to obey, while King wondered who would laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within an hour a delegation came from no less a person than Yasmini
+      herself, bearing her compliments, and hot food savory enough to make a
+      brass idol's mouth water. By that time King had his sets of surgical
+      instruments and drugs and bandages all laid out on one of the beds and
+      covered from view by a blanket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was only one more proof of the British army's everlasting luck that one
+      of the men, who set the great brass dish of food on the floor near King,
+      had a swollen cheek, and that he should touch the swelling clumsily, as he
+      lifted his hand to shake back a lock of greasy hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There followed an oath like flint struck on steel ten times in rapid
+      succession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does it pain thee, brother?&rdquo; asked Kurram Khan the hakim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are there devils in Tophet! Fire and my veins are one!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man did not notice the eagerness beaming out of King's horn-rimmed
+      spectacles, but Ismail did; it seemed to him time to prove his virtues as
+      assistant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the famous hakim Kurram Khan,&rdquo; he boasted. &ldquo;He can cure anything,
+      and for a very little fee!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, for no fee at all in this case!&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man looked incredulous, but King drew the covering from his row of
+      instruments and bottles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take a chance!&rdquo; he advised. &ldquo;None but the brave wins anything!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man sat down, as if he would argue the point at length, but Ismail and
+      Darya Khan were new to the business and enthusiastic. They had him down,
+      held tight on the floor to the huge amusement of the rest, before the man
+      could even protest; and his howls of rage did him no good, for Ismail
+      drove the hilt of a knife between his open jaws to keep them open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A very large proportion of King's stores consisted of morphia and cocaine.
+      He injected enough cocaine to deaden the man's nerves, and allowed it time
+      to work. Then he drew out three back teeth in quick succession, to make
+      sure he had the right one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail let the victim up, and Darya Khan gave him water in a brass cup.
+      Utterly without pain for the first time for days, the man was as grateful
+      as a wolf freed from a trap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Allah reward thee, since the service was free!&rdquo; he smirked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are there any others in pain in Khinjan?&rdquo; King asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Listen to him! What is Khinjan? Is there one man without a wound or a
+      sore or a scar or a sickness?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, tell them,&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I show my jaw, there will be a fight to be first! Make ready, hakim!
+      I go!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was true to his word and left the cave like a gust of wind, followed by
+      the three who had come with him. King sat down to eat, but he had not
+      finished his meal--he had made the last little heap of rice into a
+      ball with his fingers, native style, and was mopping up the last of the
+      curried gravy with it--when the advance guard of the lame and the
+      halt and the sick made its appearance. The cave's entrance became jammed
+      with them, and no riot ever made more noise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hakim! Ho, hakim! Where is the hakim who draws teeth? Where is the man
+      who knows yunani?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ten men burst down the passage all together, all clamoring, and one man
+      wasted no time at all but began to tear away bloody bandages to show his
+      wound. The hardest thing now was to get and keep some kind of order, and
+      for ten minutes Ismail and Darya Khan labored, using threats where
+      argument failed, and brute force when they dared. It was like beating mad
+      hounds from off their worry. What established order at last was that King
+      rolled up his sleeves and began, so that eagerness gave place to wonder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; are not squeamish in any one particular; so that the fact that
+      the cave became a shambles upset nobody. The surgeon's thrill that makes
+      even half-amateurs oblivious of all but the work in hand, coupled with the
+      desperate need of winning this first trick, made King horror-proof; and
+      nobody waiting for the next turn was troubled because the man under the
+      knife screamed a little or bled more than usual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they died--and more than one did die--men carried them out
+      and flung them over the precipice into the waterfall below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail and Darya Khan became choosers of the victims. They seized a man,
+      laid him on the bed, tore off his disgusting bandages and held their
+      breath until the awful resulting stench had more or less dispersed. Then
+      King would probe or lance or bandage as he saw fit, using anaesthetics
+      when he must, but managing mostly without them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They almost flung money at him. Few of them asked what his fee would be.
+      Those who had no money brought him shawls, and swords, and even clothing.
+      Two or three brought old-fashioned fire-arms; but they were men who did
+      not expect to live. And King accepted every gift without comment, because
+      that was in keeping with the part he played. He tossed money and clothes
+      and every other thing they gave him into a corner at the back of the cave,
+      and nobody tried to steal them back, although a man suspected of honesty
+      in that company would have been tortured to death as an heretic and would
+      have had no sympathy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For hour after gruesome hour he toiled over wounds and sores such as only
+      battles and evil living can produce, until men began to come at last with
+      fresh wounds, all caused by bullets, wrapped in bandages on which the
+      blood had caked but had not grown foul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There has been fighting in the Khyber,&rdquo; somebody informed him, and he
+      stopped with lancet in mid-air to listen, scanning a hundred faces swiftly
+      in the smoky lamplight. There were ten men who held lamps for him, one of
+      them a newcomer, and it was he who spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fighting in the Khyber! Aye! We were a little lashkar, but we drove them
+      back into their fort! Aye! we slew many!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a jihad yet?&rdquo; King asked, as if the world might be coming to an end.
+      The words were startled out of him. Under other circumstances he would
+      never have asked that question so directly; but he had lost reckoning of
+      everything but these poor devils' dreadful need of doctoring, and he was
+      like a man roused out of a dream. If a holy war had been proclaimed
+      already, then he was engaged on a forlorn hope. But the man laughed at
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, not yet. Bull-with-a-beard holds back yet. This was a little fight.
+      The jihad shall come later!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And who is 'Bull-with-a-beard'?&rdquo; King wondered; but he did not ask that
+      question because his wits were awake again. It pays not to be in too much
+      of a hurry to know things in the &ldquo;Hills.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As it happened, he asked no more questions, for there came a shout at the
+      cave entrance whose purport he did not catch, and within five minutes
+      after that, without a word of explanation, the cave was left empty of all
+      except his own five men. They carried away the men too sick to walk and
+      vanished, snatching the last man away almost before King's fingers had
+      finished tying the bandage on his wound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why is that?&rdquo; he asked Ismail. &ldquo;Why did they go? Who shouted?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is night,&rdquo; Ismail answered. &ldquo;It was time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King stared about him. He had not realized until then that without aid of
+      the lamps he could not see his own hand held out in front of him; his eyes
+      had grown used to the gloom, like those of the surgeons in the sick-bays
+      below the water line in Nelson's fleet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But who shouted?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who knows? There is only one here who gives orders. We be many who obey,&rdquo;
+       said Ismail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whose men were the last ones?&rdquo; King asked him, trying a new line.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bull-with-a-beard's.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And whose man art thou, Ismail?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Afridi hesitated, and when he spoke at last there was not quite the
+      same assurance in his voice as once there had been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am hers! Be thou hers, too! But it is night. Sleep against the toil
+      tomorrow. There be many sick in Khinjan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King made a little effort to clean the cave, but the task was hopeless.
+      For one thing he was so weary that his very bones were water; for another,
+      Ismail pretended to be equally tired, and when the suggestion that they
+      should help was put to the others they claimed their izzat indignantly.
+      Izzat and sharm (honor and shame) are the two scarcely distinguishable
+      enemies of honest work, into whose teeth it takes both nerve and
+      resolution to drive a Hillman at the best of times. Nerve King had, but
+      his resolution was asleep. He was too tired to care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He appointed them to two-hour watches, to relieve one another until dawn,
+      and flung himself on a clean bed. He was asleep before his head had met
+      the pillow; and for all he knew to the contrary he dreamed of Yasmini all
+      night long.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to him that she came into the cave--she the woman of the
+      faded photograph the general had given him in Peshawur--and that the
+      cave became filled with the strange intoxicating scent that had first
+      wooed his senses in her reception room in Delhi.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He dreamed that she called him by name. First, &ldquo;King sahib!&rdquo; Then, &ldquo;Kurram
+      Khan!&rdquo; And her voice was surprisingly familiar. But dreams are strange
+      things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He sleeps!&rdquo; said the same voice presently. &ldquo;It is good that he sleeps!&rdquo;
+       And in his sleep he thought that a shadowy Ismail grunted an answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that he was very sure in his dream that it was good to sleep,
+      although a voice he did not recognize and that he was quite sure was a
+      dream-voice, kept whispering to him to wake up and protect himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the scent grew stronger, and he began to dream of cobras, that danced
+      with a woman and struck at her so swiftly that she had to become two women
+      in order to avoid them; and Rewa Gunga came and laughed at both and called
+      them amateurs, so that the woman became enraged and drew a bronze-bladed
+      dagger with a golden hilt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then intelligible dreams ceased altogether, and he, slept like a dead man,
+      but with a vague suggestion ever with him that Yasmini was not very far
+      away, and that she was interested in him to a point that was actually
+      embarrassing. It was like the ether-dream he once dreamt in a hospital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he awoke at last it was after dawn, and light shone down the passage
+      into his cave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ismail!&rdquo; he shouted, for he was thirsty. But there was no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Darya Khan!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again there was no answer. He called each of the other men by name with
+      the same result.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up and realized then for the first time that he had not undressed
+      himself the night before. His head felt heavy, and although he did not
+      believe he had been drugged, there was a scent he half-recognized that
+      permeated the cave, and even overcame the dreadful atmosphere that the
+      sick of yesterday had left behind. He decided to go to the cave mouth,
+      summon his men, who were no doubt sleeping as he had done, sniff the fresh
+      air outside and come back to try the scent again; he would know then
+      whether his nose were deceiving him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there was no Ismail near the entrance--no Darya Khan--nor
+      any of the other men. The horse was gone. So was the mule. So was the
+      harness, and everything he had, except the drugs and instruments and the
+      presents the sick had given him; he had noticed all those still lying
+      about in confusion when he woke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ismail!&rdquo; he shouted at the top of his lungs, thinking they might all be
+      outside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He heard a man hawk and spit, close to the entrance, and went out to see.
+      A man whom he had never seen before leaned on a magazine rifle and eyed
+      him as a tiger eyes its prey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No farther!&rdquo; he growled, bringing his rifle to the port.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo; King asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Allah! When a camel dies in the Khyber do the kites ask why? Go in!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought then of Yasmini's bracelet, that always gained him at least
+      civility from every man who saw it. He held up his left wrist and knew
+      that instant why it felt uncomfortable. The bracelet has disappeared!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned back into the cave to hunt for it, and the strange scent greeted
+      him again. In spite of the surrounding stench of drugs and filthy wounds,
+      there was no mistaking it. If it had been her special scent in Delhi, as
+      Saunders swore it was, and her special scent on the note Darya Khan had
+      carried down the Khyber, then it was hers now, and she had been in the
+      cave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He hunted high and low and found no bracelet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His pistol was gone, too, and his cartridges, but not the dagger, wrapped
+      in a handkerchief, under his shirt. The money, that his patients had
+      brought him, lay on the floor untouched. It was an unusual robber who had
+      robbed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At least once in his life (or he were not human, but an angel) it dawns on
+      a man that he has done the unforgivable. It dawns on most men oftener than
+      once a week. So men learn sympathy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should have been awake to change the guard every two hours!&rdquo; he
+      admitted, sitting on the bed. &ldquo;I wouldn't hesitate to shoot another man
+      for that--or for less!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He let the thought sink in, until the very lees of shame tasted like ashes
+      in his mouth. Then, being what he was,--and there are not very many
+      men good enough to shoulder what lay ahead of him--he set the whole
+      affair behind him as part of the past and looked forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who's 'Bull-with-a-beard'?&rdquo; he wondered. &ldquo;Nobody interfered with me until
+      I doctored his men. He's in opposition. That's a fair guess. Now, who in
+      thunder--by the fat lord Harry--can 'Bull-with-a-beard' be? And
+      why fighting in the Khyber so early as all this? And why does
+      'Bull-with-a-beard,' whoever he is, hang back?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter X
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   Are jackals a tiger's friends because they flatter him and eat
+   his leavings?
+   Choose, ye with stripes and proud whiskers, choose between friend
+   and enemy.--Native Proverb
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      They came and changed the guard two hours after dawn, to the accompaniment
+      of a lot of hawking and spitting, orders growled through the mist, and the
+      crash of rifle-butts grounding on the rock path. King went to the cave
+      entrance, to look the new man over; but because he was in Khinjan, and
+      Khinjan in the &ldquo;Hills,&rdquo; where indirectness is the key to information, he
+      stood for a while at gaze, listening to the thunder of tumbling water and
+      looking at the cliff-edge six feet away that was laid like a knife in the
+      ascending mist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that the new man was a Mahsudi--no
+      sweeter to look at and no less treacherous for the fact. Also, that he had
+      boils all over the back of his neck. He was not likely to be better
+      tempered because of that fact, either. But it is an ill wind that blows no
+      good to the Secret Service.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is an end to everything,&rdquo; he remarked presently, addressing the
+      world at large, or as much as he could see of it through the cave mouth.
+      &ldquo;A hill is so high, a pool so deep, a river so wide. How long, for
+      instance, must thy watch be?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is that to thee?&rdquo; the fellow growled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is an end to pain!&rdquo; said King, adjusting his horn-rimmed
+      spectacles. &ldquo;I lanced a man's boils last night, and it hurt him, but he
+      must be well to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get in!&rdquo; growled the guard. &ldquo;She says it is sorcery! She says none are to
+      let thee touch them!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Plainly, he was in no receptive mood; orders had been spat into his hairy
+      ear too recently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get in!&rdquo; he growled, lifting his rifle-butt as if to enforce the order.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can heal boils!&rdquo; said King, retiring into the cave. Then, from a safe
+      distance down the passage, he added a word or two to sink in as the hours
+      went by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is good to be able to bend the neck without pain and to rest easily at
+      night! It is good not to flinch at another's touch. Boils are bad! Healing
+      is easy and good!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, since a quarrel was the very last thing he was looking for, he
+      retired into his own gloomy quarters at the rear, taking care to sit so
+      that he could see and overhear what passed at the entrance. Among other
+      things in the course of the day he noticed that the watch was changed
+      every four hours and that there were only three men in the guard, for the
+      same man was back again that evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At intervals throughout the day Yasmini sent him food by silent
+      messengers; so he ate, for &ldquo;the thing to do,&rdquo; says Cocker, &ldquo;is the first
+      that comes to hand, and the thing not to do is worry.&rdquo; It is not easy to
+      worry and eat heartily at one and the same time. Having eaten, he rolled
+      up his sleeves and native-made cotton trousers and proceeded to clean the
+      cave. After that he overhauled his stock of drugs and instruments,
+      repacking them and making ready against opportunity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As I told that heathen with a gun out there, there's an end to
+      everything!&rdquo; he reflected. &ldquo;May this come soon!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When they changed the guard that afternoon he had grown weary of his own
+      company and of fruitless speculation and was pacing up and down. The
+      second guard proved even less communicative than the first, up to the
+      point when, to lessen his ennui, King began to whistle. Because a Secret
+      Service man must be consistent, the tune was not English, but a weird
+      minor one to which the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; have set their favorite love song (that is,
+      all about hate in the concrete!).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The echo of the waterfall within the cave was like the roaring in a shell
+      held to the ear, but each time he came near the entrance the new guard
+      could catch a few bars of the tune. After a little while the hook-nosed
+      ruffian began to sing the words to it, in a voice like a forgotten dog's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he stopped at the entrance and changed the tune. And the guard sang the
+      words of the new tune, too. After that he came out into the light of day
+      (direct sunlight was cut off by the huge height of the cliffs all around)
+      and leaned in the entrance, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Allah preserve thee, brother!&rdquo; he remarked. &ldquo;Thine is a voice like a
+      warrior's--bold and big! Thou art a true son of the Prophet!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo; said the fellow, &ldquo;that I am! Allah preserve thee, for thou hast
+      more need of it than I, although I guard thee just at present. Whistle me
+      another one!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So King whistled the refrain of a song that boasts of an Afghan invasion
+      of India, and of the loot that came of it, and the prisoners, and the
+      women--particularly the women, mentioning more than a few of them by
+      name, and their charms in detail. It was a song to warm the very cockles
+      of a Hillman's heart. Nothing could have been better chosen for that
+      setting, of a cave mouth half-way down the side of a gash in earth's
+      wildest mountains, with the blue sky resting on a jagged rim a mile above.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; said the bearded jailer. &ldquo;Now begin again and I will sing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He threw his head back and howled until the mountain walls rang with the
+      song, and other men in far-off caves took it up and howled it back at him.
+      When he left off singing at last, to drink from a water-bottle, that
+      surely had been looted from a British soldier, King decided to be done
+      with overtures and make the next move in the game.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Didst thou ever sing for her?&rdquo; he asked, and the man turned round to
+      stare at him as if he were mad, King saw then a blood-soaked bandage on
+      the right of his neck, not very far from the jugular.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When she sings we are silent! When she is silent it is good to wait a
+      while and see!&rdquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hah!&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;Was that wound got in the Khyber the other day?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay. Here in Khinjan. I had my thumb in a man's eye, and the bastard bit
+      me! May devils do worse to him where he has gone! I threw him into Earth's
+      Drink!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A good place for one's enemies!&rdquo; laughed King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man told me last night,&rdquo; said King, drawing on imagination without any
+      compunction at all, &ldquo;that the fight in the Khyber was because a jihad is
+      launched aleady.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That man lied!&rdquo; said the guard, shifting position uneasily, as if afraid
+      to talk too much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I told him!&rdquo; answered King. &ldquo;I told him there never will be another
+      jihad.&rdquo;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then art thou a greater liar than he!&rdquo; the guard answered hotly. &ldquo;There
+      will be a jihad when she is ready, such an one as never yet was! India
+      shall bleed for all the fat years she has lain unplundered! Not a throat
+      of an unbeliever in the world shall be left un-slit! No jihad? Thou liar!
+      Get in out of my sight!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So King retired into the cave, with something new to think about. Was she
+      planning the jihad! Or pretending to plan one? Every once in a while the
+      guard leaned far into the cave mouth and huried adjectives at him, the
+      mildest of which was a well of information. If his temper was the temper
+      of the &ldquo;Hills,&rdquo; it was easy to read disappointment for a jihad that should
+      have been already but had been postponed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they changed the guard again the new man proved surly. There was no
+      getting a word out of him. He showed dirty yellow teeth in a wolfish
+      snarl, and his only answer was a lifted rifle and a crooked forefinger.
+      King let him alone and paced the cave for hours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was squatting on his bed-end in the dark, like a spectacled image of
+      Buddha, when the first of the three men came on guard again and at last
+      Ismail came for him holding a pitchy torch that filled the dim passage
+      full of acrid smoke and made both of them cough. Ismail was red-eyed with
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; he growled. &ldquo;Come, little hakim!&rdquo; Then he turned on his heel at
+      once, as if afraid of being twitted with desertion. He seemed to want to
+      get outside, where he could keep out of range of words, yet not to wish to
+      seem unfriendly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But King made no effort to speak to him, following in silence out on to
+      the dark ledge above the waterfall and noticing that the guard with the
+      boils was back again on duty. He grinned evilly out of a shadow as King
+      passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make an end!&rdquo; he advised, spitting over the Cliff into thunderous
+      darkness to illustrate the suggestion. &ldquo;Jump, hakim, before a worse thing
+      happens!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To add further point he kicked a loose stone over the edge, and the
+      movement caused him to bend his neck and so inadvertently to hurt his
+      boils. He cursed, and there was pity in King's voice when he spoke next.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do they hurt thee?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye, like the devil! Khinjan is a place of plagues!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could heal them,&rdquo; King said, passing on, and the man stared hard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; boomed Ismail through the darkness, shaking the torch to make it
+      burn better and beckoning impatiently, and King hurried after him, leaving
+      behind a savage at the cave mouth who fingered his sores and wondered,
+      muttering, leaning on a rifle, muttering and muttering again as if he had
+      seen a new light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Instead of waiting for King to catch up, Ismail began to lead the way at
+      great speed along a path that descended gradually until it curved round
+      the end of the chasm and plunged into a tunnel where the darkness grew
+      opaque. In the tunnel the torch's smoke cast weird shadows on walls and
+      roof, and the fitful light only confused, so that Ismail slowed down and
+      let him come up close.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then for thirty minutes he led swiftly down a crazy devil's stairway of
+      uneven boulders, stopping to lend a hand at the worst places, but
+      everlastingly urging him to hurry. They were both breathless, and King was
+      bruised in a dozen places when they reached level going at least six or
+      seven hundred feet below the cave from which they started.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the hell-mouth gloom began to grow faintly luminous, and the
+      waterfall's thunder burst on their ears from close at hand. They emerged
+      into fresh wet air and a sea of sound, on a rock ledge like the one above.
+      Ismail raised the torch and waved it. The fire and smoke wandered up,
+      until they flattened on a moving opal dome, that prisoned all the noises
+      in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Earth's Drink!&rdquo; he announced, waving the torch and then shutting his
+      mouth tight, as if afraid to voice sacrilege.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the river, million-colored in the torch-light, pouring from a
+      half-mile-long slash in the cliff above them and plunging past them
+      through the gloom toward the very middle of the world. Its width was a
+      matter of memory, and its depth unguessable, for although dim moonlight
+      filtered through it, he did not know where the moon was, nor how far such
+      light could penetrate through moving water. Somewhere it met rock-bottom
+      and boiled there, for a roar like the sea's came up from deeps
+      unimaginable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He watched the overturning dome until his senses reeled. Then he crawled
+      on hands and knees to the ledge's brink and tried to peer over. But Ismail
+      dragged him back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; he howled; but in all that din his shout was like a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How deep is it?&rdquo; King bellowed back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Allah! Ask Him who made it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The fear of the falls was on the Afridi, and he tugged at King's arm in a
+      frenzy of impatience. Suddenly he let go and broke into a run. King
+      trotted after him, afraid too, to look to right or left, lest the fear
+      should make him throw himself over the brink. The thunder and the hugeness
+      had their grip on him and had begun to numb his power to think and his
+      will to be a man. Suddenly when they had run a hundred yards, Ismail
+      turned sharp to the right into a tunnel that led straight back into the
+      cliff and sloped uphill. As the din of the falls grew less behind him and
+      his power to think returned, King calculated that they must be following
+      the main direction of the river bed, but edging away gradually to the
+      right of it. After ten minutes' hurrying uphill he guessed they must be
+      level with the river, in a tunnel running nearly parallel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He proved to be right, for they came to a gap in the wall, and Ismail
+      thrust the torch through it. The light shone on swift black water, and a
+      wind rushed through the gap that nearly blew the torch out. It accounted
+      altogether for the dryness of the rock and the fresh air in the tunnel.
+      The river's weight seemed to suck a hurricane along with it--air
+      enough for a million men to breathe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that there was no more need to stop at intervals and beat the torch
+      against the wall to make it burn brightly, for the wind fanned it until
+      the flame was nearly white. Ismail kept looking back to bid King hurry and
+      never paused once to rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; he urged fiercely. &ldquo;This leads to the 'Heart of the Hills'!&rdquo; And
+      after that King had to do his best to keep the Afridi's back in sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They began after a time to hear voices and to see the smoky glare made by
+      other torches. Then Ismail set the pace yet faster, and they became the
+      last two of a procession of turbaned men, who tramped along a winding
+      tunnel into a great mountain's womb. The sound of slippers clicking and
+      rutching on the rock floor swelled and died and swelled again as the
+      tunnel led from cavern into cavern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one great cave they came to every man beat out his torch and tossed it
+      on a heap. The heap was more than shoulder high, and three parts covered
+      the floor of the cave. After that there was a ledge above the height of a
+      man's head on either side of the tunnel, and along the ledge little
+      oil-burning lamps were spaced at measured intervals. They looked ancient
+      enough to have been there when the mountain itself was born, and although
+      all the brass ones suggested Indian and Hindu origin, there were others
+      among them of earthenware that looked like plunder from ancient Greece.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was like a transposition of epochs. King felt already as if the
+      twentieth century had never existed, just as he seemed to have left life
+      behind for good and all when the mosque door had closed on him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A quarter of a mile farther along the tunnel opened into another, yet
+      greater cave, and there every man kicked off his slippers, without seeming
+      to trouble how they lay; they littered the floor unarranged and uncared
+      for, looking like the cast-off wing-cases of gigantic beetles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that cave there were two sharp turns in the tunnel, and then at last
+      a sea of noise and a veritable blaze of light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Part of the noise made King feel homesick, for out of the mountain's very
+      womb brayed a music-box, such as the old-time carousels made use of before
+      the days of electricity and steam. It was being worked by inexpert hands,
+      for the time was something jerky; but it was robbed of its tinny meanness
+      and even lent majesty by the hugeness of a cavern's roof, as well as by the
+      crashing, swinging march it played--wild--wonderful--invented
+      for lawless hours and a kingless people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marchons!--Citoyens!--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The procession began to tramp in time to it, and the rock shook. They
+      deployed to left and right into a space so vast that the eye at first
+      refused to try to measure it. It was the hollow core of a mountain, filled
+      by the sea-sound of a human crowd and hung with huge stalactites that
+      danced and shifted and flung back a thousand colors at the flickering
+      light below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an undertone to the clangor of the music-box and the human hum,
+      for across the cavern's farther end for a space of two hundred yards the
+      great river rushed, penned here into a deep trough of less than a tenth
+      its normal width--plunging out of a great fanged gap and hurrying out
+      of view down another one, licking smooth banks on its way with a hungry
+      sucking sound. Its depth where it crossed the cavern's end could only be
+      guessed by remembering the half-mile breadth of the waterfall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were little lamps everywhere, perched on ledges amid the
+      stalactites, and they suffused the whole cavern in golden glow, made the
+      crowd's faces look golden and cast golden shimmers on the cold, black
+      river bed. There was scarcely any smoke, for the wind that went like a
+      storm down the tunnel seemed to have its birth here; the air was fresh and
+      cool and never still. No doubt fresh air was pouring in continually
+      through some shaft in the rock, but the shaft was invisible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the midst of the cavern a great arena had been left bare, and thousands
+      of turbaned men squatted round it in rings. At the end where the river
+      formed a tangent to them the rings were flattened, and at that point they
+      were cut into by the ramp of a bridge, and by a lane left to connect the
+      bridge with the arena. The bridge was almost the most wonderful of all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So delicately formed that fairies might have made it with a guttered
+      candle, it spanned the river in one splendid sweep, twenty feet above
+      water, like a suspension bridge. Then, so light and graceful that it
+      scarcely seemed to touch anything at all, it swept on in irregular arches
+      downward to the arena and ceased abruptly as if shorn off by a giant ax,
+      at a point less than half-way to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Its end formed a nearly square platform, about fourteen feet above the
+      floor, and the broad track thence to the arena, as well as all the arena's
+      boundary, had been marked off by great earthenware lamps, whose greasy
+      smoke streaked up and was lost by the wind among the stalactites.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Greek lamps, every one of 'em!&rdquo; King whispered to himself, but he wasted
+      no time just then on trying to explain how Greek lamps had ever got there.
+      There was too much else to watch and wonder at.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No steps led down from the bridge end to the floor; toward the arena it
+      was blind. But from the bridge's farther end across the hurrying water
+      stairs had been hewn out of the rock wall and led up to a hole of twice a
+      man's height, more than fifty feet above water level.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On either side of the bridge end a passage had been left clear to the
+      river edge, and nobody seemed to care to invade it, although it was not
+      marked off in any way. Each passage was about fifty feet wide and quite
+      straight. But the space between the bridge end and the arena, and the
+      arena itself, had to be kept free from trespassers by fifty swaggering
+      ruffians armed to the teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every man of the thousands there had a knife in evidence, but the arena
+      guards had magazine rifles well as Khyber tulwars. Nobody else wore
+      firearms openly. Some of the arena guards bore huge round shields of
+      prehistoric pattern of a size and sort he had never seen before, even in
+      museums. But there was very little that he was seeing that night of a kind
+      that he had seen before anywhere!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The guards lolled insolently, conscious of brute strength and special
+      favor. When any man trespassed with so much as a toe beyond the ring of
+      lamps, a guard would slap his rifle-butt until the swivels rattled and the
+      offender would scurry into bounds amid the jeers of any who had seen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shoving, kicking and elbowing with set purpose, Ismail forced a way
+      through the already seated crowd, and drew King down into the cramped
+      space beside him, close enough to the arena to be able to catch the
+      guards' low laughter. But he was restless. He wished to get nearer yet,
+      only there seemed no room anywhere in front.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The music-box was hidden. King could see it nowhere. Five minutes after he
+      and Ismail were seated it stopped playing. The hum of the crowd died too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then a guard threw his shield down with a clang and deliberately fired his
+      rifle at the roof. The ricocheting bullet brought down a shower of
+      splintered stone and stalactite, and he grinned as he watched the crowd
+      dodge to avoid it. Before they had done dodging and while he yet grinned,
+      a chant began--ghastly--tuneless--so out of time that the
+      words were not intelligible--yet so obvious in general meaning that
+      nobody could hear it and not understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a devils' anthem, glorifying hellishness--suggestive of the
+      gnashing of a million teeth, and the whicker of drawn blades--more
+      shuddersome and mean than the wind of a winter's night. And it ceased as
+      suddenly as it had begun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another ruffian fired at the roof, and while the crack of the shot yet
+      echoed seven other of the arena guards stepped forward with long horns and
+      blew a blast. That was greeted by a yell that made the cavern tremble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Instantly a hundred men rose from different directions and raced for the
+      arena, each with a curved sword in either hand. The yelling changed back
+      into the chant, only louder than before, and by that much more terrible.
+      Cymbals crashed. The music-box resumed its measured grinding of The
+      Marseillaise. And the hundred began an Afridi sword dance, than which
+      there is nothing wilder in all the world. Its like can only be seen under
+      the shadow of the &ldquo;Hills.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail put his hands together and howled through them like a wolf on the
+      war-path, nudging King with an elbow. So King imitated him, although one
+      extra shout in all that din seemed thrown away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dancers pranced in a circle, each man whirling both swords around his
+      head and the head of the man in front of him at a speed that passed
+      belief. Their long black hair shook and swayed. The sweat began to pour
+      from them until their arms and shoulders glistened. The speed increased.
+      Another hundred men leaped in, forming a new ring outside the first, only
+      facing the other way. Another hundred and fifty formed a ring outside them
+      again, with the direction again reversed; and two hundred and fifty more
+      formed an outer circle--all careering at the limit of their power,
+      gasping as the beasts do in the fury of fighting to the death, slitting
+      the air until it whistled, with swords that missed human heads by
+      immeasurable fractions of an inch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail seemed obsessed by the spirit of hell let loose--drawn by it,
+      as by a magnet, although subsequent events proved him not to have been
+      altogether without a plan. He got up, with his eyes fixed on the dance,
+      and dragged King with him to a place ten rows nearer the arena, that had
+      been vacated by a dancer. There--two, where there was only rightly
+      room for one--he thrust himself and King next to some Orakzai
+      Pathans, elbowing savagely to right and left to make room. And patience
+      proved scarce. The instant oaths of anything but greeting were like
+      overture to a dog fight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bismillah!&rdquo; swore the nearest man, deigning to use intelligible sentences
+      at last. &ldquo;Shall a dog of an Afridi bustle me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He reached for the ever-ready Pathan knife, and Ismail, with both eyes on
+      the dancing, neither heard nor saw. The Pathan leaned past King to stab,
+      but paused in the instant that his knife licked clear. From a swift
+      side-glance at King's face be changed to full stare, his scowl slowly
+      giving place to a grin as he recognized him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Allah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He drove the long blade back again, fidgeting about to make more room and
+      kicking out at his next neighbor to the same end, so that presently King
+      sat on the rock floor instead of on other men's hip-bones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well met, hakim! See--the wound heals finely!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Baring his shoulder under the smelly sheepskin coat, he lifted a bandage
+      gingerly to show the clean opening out of which King had coaxed a bullet
+      the day before. It looked wholesome and ready to heal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Name thy reward, hakim! We Orakzai Pathans forget no favors!&rdquo; (Now that
+      boast was a true one.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King glanced to his left and saw that there was no risk of being overheard
+      or interrupted by Ismail; the Afridi was beating his fists together,
+      rocking from side to side in frenzy, and letting out about one yell a
+      minute that would have curdled a wolf's heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, I have all I need!&rdquo; he answered, and the Pathan laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In thine own time, hakim! Need forgets none of us!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;True!&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded more to himself than to the other man. He needed, for instance,
+      very much to know who was planning a jihad, and who &ldquo;Bull-with-a-beard&rdquo;
+       might be; but it was not safe to confide just yet in a chance-made
+      acquaintance. A very fair acquaintance with some phases of the East had
+      taught him that names such as Bull-with-a-beard are often almost
+      photographically descriptive. He rose to his feet to look. A blind man can
+      talk, but it takes trained eyes to gather information.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The din had increased, and it was safe to stand up and stare, because all
+      eyes were on the madness in the middle. There were plenty besides himself
+      who stood to get a better view, and he had to dodge from side to side to
+      see between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not to doctor his men. Therefore it's a fair guess that he and I are
+      to be kept apart. Therefore he'll be as far away from me now as possible,
+      supposing he's here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Reasoning along that line, he tried to see the face on the far side, but
+      the problem was to see over the dancers' heads. He succeeded presently,
+      for the Orakzai Pathan saw what he wanted, and in his anxiety to be
+      agreeable, reached forward to pull back a box from between the ranks in
+      front.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Its owners offered instant fight, but made no further objection when they
+      saw who wanted it and why. King wondered at their sudden change of mind,
+      the Pathan looked actually grieved that a fight should have been spared
+      him. He tried, with a few barbed insults, to rearouse a spark of enmity,
+      but failed, to his own great discontent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The box was a commonplace affair, built square, of pine, and had probably
+      contained somebody's new helmet at one stage of its career. The stenciled
+      marks on its sides and top had long ago become obliterated by wear and
+      dirt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King got up on it and gazed long at the rows of spectators on the far
+      side, and having no least notion what to look for, he studied the faces
+      one by one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If he's important enough for her to have it in for him, he'll not be far
+      from the front,&rdquo; he reasoned and with that in mind he picked out several
+      bull-necked, bearded men, any one of whom could easily have answered to
+      the description. There were too many of them to give him any comfort,
+      until the thought occurred to him that a man with brains enough to be a
+      leader would not be so obsessed and excited by mere prancing athleticism
+      as those men were. Then he looked farther along the line.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found a man soon who was not interested in the dancing, but who had
+      eyes and ears apparently for everything and everybody else. He watched him
+      for ten minutes, until at last their eyes met. Then he sat down and kicked
+      the box back to its owners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked again at Ismail. With teeth clenched and eyes ablaze, the Afridi
+      was smashing his knuckles together and rocking to and fro. There was no
+      need to fear him. He turned and touched the Pathan's broad shoulder. The
+      man smiled and bent his turbaned head to listen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Opposite,&rdquo; said King, &ldquo;nearly exactly opposite--three rows back from
+      the front, counting the front row as one--there sits a man with his
+      arm in a sling and a bandage over his eye.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pathan nodded and touched his knife-hilt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One-and-twenty men from him, counting him as one, sits a man with a big
+      black beard, whose shoulders are like a bull's. As he sits he hangs his
+      head between them--thus.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you want him killed? Nay, I think you mean Muhammad Anim. His time is
+      not yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The suggestion was as good-naturedly prompt as if the hakim's need had
+      been water, and the other's flask were empty. He was sorry he could not
+      offer to oblige.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who am I that I should want him killed?&rdquo; King answered with mild reproof.
+      &ldquo;My trade is to heal, not slay. I am a hakim.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet, to enter Khinjan Caves you had to slay a man, hakim or no!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was an unbeliever,&rdquo; King answered modestly, and the other nodded again
+      with friendly understanding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What about the man yonder, then?&rdquo; the Pathan asked. &ldquo;What will you have
+      of him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look! See! Tell me truly what his name is!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pathan got up and strode forward to stand on the box, kicking aside
+      the elbows that leaned on it and laughing when the owners cursed him. He
+      stood on it and stared for five minutes, counting deliberately three times
+      over, striking a finger on the palm of his hand to check himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bull-with-a-beard!&rdquo; he announced at last, dropping back into place beside
+      King. &ldquo;Muhammad Anim. The mullah Muhammad Anim.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An Afghan?&rdquo; King asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He says he is an Afghan. But unless he lies he is from Ishtamboul
+      (Constantinople).&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Itching to ask more questions, King sat still and held his peace. The
+      direr the need of information in the &ldquo;Hills,&rdquo; and in all the East for that
+      matter, the greater the wisdom, as a rule, of seeming uninquisitive. And
+      wisdom was rewarded now, for the Pathan, who would have dried up under
+      eager questioning, grew talkative. Civility and volubility are sometimes
+      one, and not always only among the civilized. King--the hakim Kurram
+      Khan--blinked mildly behind his spectacles and looked like one to
+      whom a savage might safely ease his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He bade me go to Sikaram where my village is and bring him a hundred men
+      for his lashkar. He says he has her special favor. Wait and watch, I say!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has he money?&rdquo; asked King, apparently drawing a bow at a venture for
+      conversation's sake. But there is an art in asking artless questions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye! The liar says the Germans gave it to him! He swears they will send
+      more. Who are the Germans? Who is a man who talks of a jihad that is to
+      be, that he should have gold coin given him by unbelievers? I saw a German
+      once, at Nuklao. He ate pig-meat and washed it down with wine. Are such
+      men sons of the Prophet? Wait and watch, say I!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Money?&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;He admits it? And none dare kill him for it? You say
+      his time is not yet come?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      More than ever it was obvious that the hakim was a very simple man. The
+      Pathan made a gesture of contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dare what I will, hakim! But he says there is more money on the way!
+      When he has it all--why--we are all in Allah's keeping--He
+      decides!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And should no more money come?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was courteous conversation and received as such--many a long
+      league removed from curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who am I to foretell a man's kismet? I know what I know, and I think what
+      I think! I know thee, hakim, for a gentle fellow, who hurt me almost not
+      at all in the drawing of a bullet out of my flesh. What knowest thou about
+      me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That I will dress the wound for thee again!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Artless statements are as useful in their way as artless questions. Let
+      the guile lie deep, that is all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, nay! For she said nay! Shall I fall foul of her, for the sake of a
+      new bandage?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The temptation was terrific to ask why she had given that order, but King
+      resisted it; and presently it occurred to the Pathan that his own theories
+      on the subject might be of interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She will use thee for a reward,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;He who shall win and keep her
+      favor may have his hurts dressed and his belly dosed. Her enemies may
+      rot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is fool enough to be her enemy?&rdquo; asked King, the altogether mild and
+      guileless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pathan stuck out his tongue and squeezed his nose with one finger
+      until it nearly disappeared into his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If she calls a man enemy, how shall he prove otherwise?&rdquo; he answered.
+      Then he rolled off center, to pull out his great snuff-box from the
+      leather bag at his waist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does she call the mullah Muhammad Anim enemy?&rdquo; King asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, she never mentions him by name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Art thou a man of thy word?&rdquo; King asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When it suits me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was a promise regarding my reward.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Name it, hakim! We will see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go tell the mullah Muhammad Anim where I sit!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The fellow laughed. He considered himself tricked; one could read that
+      plainly enough; for taking polite messages does not come within the Hills'
+      elastic code of izzat, although carrying a challenge is another matter.
+      Yet he felt grateful for the hakim's service and was ready to seize the
+      first cheap means of squaring the indebtedness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Keep my place!&rdquo; he ordered, getting up. He growled it, as some men speak
+      to dogs, because growling soothed his ruffled vanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He helped himself noisily to snuff then and began to clear a passage,
+      kicking out to right and left and laughing when his victims protested.
+      Before he had traversed fifty yards he had made himself more enemies than
+      most men dare aspire to in a lifetime, and he seemed well pleased with the
+      fruit of his effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dance went on for fifteen minutes yet, but then--quite
+      unexpectedly--all the arena guards together fired a volley at the
+      roof, and the dance stopped as if every dancer had been hit. The
+      spectators were set surging by the showers of stone splinters, that hurt
+      whom they struck, and their snarl was like a wolf-pack's when a tiger
+      interferes. But the guards thought it all a prodigious joke and the more
+      the crowd swore the more they laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Panting--foaming at the mouth, some of them--the dancers ran to
+      their seats and set the crowd surging again, leaving the arena empty of
+      all but the guards. The man whose seat Ismail had taken came staggering,
+      slippery with sweat, and squeezed himself where he belonged, forcing King
+      into the Pathan's empty place. Ismail threw his arms round the man and
+      patted him, calling him &ldquo;mighty dancer,&rdquo; &ldquo;son of the wind,&rdquo; &ldquo;prince of
+      prancers,&rdquo; &ldquo;prince of swordsmen,&rdquo; &ldquo;war-horse,&rdquo; and a dozen more endearing
+      epithets. The fellow lay back across Ismail's knees, breathless but well
+      enough contented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And after a few more minutes the Orakzai Pathan came back, and King tried
+      to make room for him to sit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I bade thee keep my place!&rdquo; he growled, towering over King and plucking
+      at his knife-belt irresolutely. He made it clear without troubling to use
+      words that any other man would have had to fight, and the hakim might
+      think himself lucky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take my seat,&rdquo; said King, struggling to get up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, nay--sit still, thou. I can kick room for myself. So! So! So!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an answering snarl of hate that seemed like a song to him, amid
+      which he sat down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The mullah Muhammad Anim answered he knows nothing of thee and cares
+      less! He said--and he said it with vehemence--it is no more to
+      him where a hakim sits than where the rats hide!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He watched King's face and seeing that, King allowed his facial muscles to
+      express chagrin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Between us, it is a poor time for messages to him. He is too full of
+      pride that his lashkar should have beaten the British.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did they beat the British greatly?&rdquo; King asked him, with only vague
+      interest on his face and a prayer inside him that his heart might flutter
+      less violently against his ribs. His voice was as non-committal as the
+      mullah's message.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who knows, when so many men would rather lie than kill? Each one who
+      returned swears he slew a hundred. But some did not return. Wait and
+      watch, say I!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now a man stood up near the edge of the crowd whom King recognized; and
+      recognition brought no joy with it. The mullah without hair or eyelashes,
+      who had admitted him and his party through the mosque into the Caves,
+      strode out to the middle of the arena all alone, strutting and swaggering.
+      He recalled the man's last words and drew no consolation from them,
+      either.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Many have entered! Some went out by a different road!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Cold chills went down his back. All at once Ismail's manner became
+      unencouraging. He ceased to make a fuss over the dancer and began to eye
+      King sidewise, until at last he seemed unable to contain the malice that
+      would well forth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At the gate there were only words!&rdquo; he whispered. &ldquo;Here in this cavern
+      men wait for proof!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He licked his teeth suggestively, as a wolf does when he contemplates a
+      meal. Then, as an afterthought, as though ashamed, &ldquo;I love thee! Thou art
+      a man after my own heart! But I am her man! Wait and see!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The mullah in the arena, blinking with his lashless eyes, held both arms
+      up for silence in the attitude of a Christian priest blessing a
+      congregation. The guards backed his silent demand with threatening rifles.
+      The din died to a hiss of a thousand whispers, and then the great cavern
+      grew still, and only the river could be heard sucking hungrily between the
+      smooth stone banks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God is great!&rdquo; the mullah howled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God is great!&rdquo; the crowd thundered in echo to him; and then the vault
+      took up the echoes. &ldquo;God is great--is great--is great--ea--ea--eat!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And Muhammad is His prophet!&rdquo; howled the mullah. Instantly they answered
+      him again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And Muhammad is His prophet!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His prophet--is His prophet--is His prophet!&rdquo; said the
+      stalactites, in loud barks--then in murmurs--then in awe-struck
+      whispers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That seemed to be all the religious ritual Khinjan remembered or could
+      tolerate. Considering that the mullah, too, must have killed his man in
+      cold blood before earning the right to be there, perhaps it was enough--too
+      much. There were men not far from King who shuddered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are strangers!&rdquo; announced the mullah, as a man might say, &ldquo;I smell
+      a rat!&rdquo; But he did not look at anybody in particular; he blinked at the
+      crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Strangers!&rdquo; said the stalactites, in an awe-struck whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Show them! Show them! Let them stand forth!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh-h-h-h-h! Let them stand forth!&rdquo; said the roof.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mullah bowed as if that idea were a new one and he thought it better
+      than his own; for all crowds love flattery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bring them!&rdquo; he shouted, and King suppressed a shudder--for what
+      proof had he of right to be there beyond Ismail's verbal corroboration of
+      a lie? Would Ismail lie for him again? he wondered. And if so, would the
+      lie be any use?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not far from where King sat there was an immediate disturbance in the
+      crowd, and a wretched-looking Baluchi was thrust forward at a run, with
+      arms lashed to his sides and a pitiful look of terror on his face. Two
+      more Baluchis were hustled along after him, protesting a little, but
+      looking almost as hopeless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once in the arena, the guards took charge of all three of them and lined
+      them up facing the mullah, clubbing them with their rifle-butts to get
+      quick obedience. The crowd began to be noisy again, but the mullah signed
+      for silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These are traitors!&rdquo; he howled, with a gesture such as Ajax might have
+      used when he defied the lightning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The roof said &ldquo;Traitors!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Slay them, then!&rdquo; howled the crowd, delighted. And blinking behind the
+      horn-rimmed spectacles, King began to look about busily for hope, where
+      there did not seem to be any.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, hear me first!&rdquo; the mullah howled, and his voice was like a wolf's
+      at hunting time. &ldquo;Hear, and be warned!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The crowd grew very still, but King saw that some men licked their lips,
+      as if they well knew what was coming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These three men came, and one was a new man!&rdquo; the mullah howled. &ldquo;The
+      other two were his witnesses! All three swore that the first man came from
+      slaying an unbeliever in the teeth of written law. They said he ran from
+      the law. So, as the custom is, I let all three enter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; said the crowd. &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; They might have been five thousand judges,
+      judging in equity, so grave they were. Yet they licked their lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But later, word came to me saying they are liars. So--again as the
+      custom is--I ordered them bound and held!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Slay them! Slay them!&rdquo; the crowd yelped, gleeful as a wolf-pack on a
+      scent and abandoning solemnity as suddenly as it had been assumed. &ldquo;Slay
+      them!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They were like the wind, whipping in and out among Khinjan's rocks, savage
+      and then still for a minute, savage and then still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, there is a custom yet!&rdquo; the mullah howled, holding up both arms. And
+      there was silence again like the lull before a hurricane, with only the
+      great black river talking to itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who speaks for them? Does any speak for them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Speak for them?&rdquo; said the roof.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was silence. Then there was a murmur of astonishment. Over opposite
+      to where King sat the mullah stood up, who the Pathan had said was
+      &ldquo;Bull-with-a-beard&rdquo;--Muhammad Anim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The men are mine!&rdquo; he growled. His voice was like a bear's at bay; it was
+      low, but it carried strangely. And as he spoke he swung his great head
+      between his shoulders, like a bear that means to charge. &ldquo;The proof they
+      brought has been stolen! They had good proof! I speak for them! The men
+      are mine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pathan nudged King in the ribs with an elbow like a club and tickled
+      his ear with hot breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bull-with-a-beard speaks truth!&rdquo; he grinned. &ldquo;'Truth and a lie together!
+      Good may it do him and them! They die, they three Baluchis!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Proof!&rdquo; howled the mullah who had no hair eyelashes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Proof--oof--oof!&rdquo; said the stalactites.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Proof! Show us proof!&rdquo; yelled the crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Words at the gate--proof in the cavern!&rdquo; howled the lashless one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pathan next King leaned over to whisper to him again, but stiffened in
+      the act. There was a great gasp the same instant, as the whole crowd
+      caught its breath all together. The mullah in the middle froze into
+      immobility. Bull-with-a-beard stood mumbling, swaying his great head from
+      side to side, no longer suggestive of a bear about to charge, but of one
+      who hesitates.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The crowd was staring at the end of the bridge. King stared, too, and
+      caught his own breath. For Yasmini stood there, smiling on them all as the
+      new moon smiles down on the Khyber! She had come among them like a spirit,
+      all unheralded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much more beautiful than the one likeness King had seen of her that for
+      a second he doubted who she was--more lovely than he had imagined her
+      even in his dreams--she stood there, human and warm and real, who had
+      begun to seem a myth, clad in gauzy transparent stuff that made no secret
+      of sylph-like shapeliness and looking nearly light enough to blow away.
+      Her feet--and they were the most marvelously molded things he had
+      ever seen--were naked and played restlessly on the naked stone. Not
+      one part of her was still for a fraction of a second; yet the whole effect
+      was of insolently lazy ease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes blazed brighter than the little jewels stitched to her gossamer
+      dress, and when a man once looked at them he did not find it easy to look
+      away again. Even mullah Muhammad Anim seemed transfixed, like a great
+      foolish animal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But King was staring very hard indeed at something else--mentally
+      cursing the plain glass spectacles he wore, that had begun to film over
+      and dim his vision. There were two bracelets on her arm, both barbaric
+      things of solid gold. The smaller of the two was on her wrist and the
+      larger on her upper arm, but they were so alike, except for size, and so
+      exactly like the one Rewa Gunga had given him in her name and that had
+      been stolen from him in the night, that he ran the risk of removing the
+      glasses a moment to stare with unimpeded eyes. Even then the distance was
+      too great. He could not quite see.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But her eyes began to search the crowd in his direction, and then he knew
+      two things absolutely. He was sitting where she had ordered Ismail to
+      place him; for she picked him out almost instantly, and laughed as if
+      somebody had struck a silver bell. And one of those bracelets was the one
+      that he had worn; for she flaunted it at him, moving her arm so that the
+      light should make the gold glitter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, perhaps because the crowd had begun to whisper, and she wanted all
+      attention, she raised both arms to toss back the golden hair that came
+      cascading nearly to her knees. And as if the crowd knew that symptom well,
+      it drew its breath in sharply and grew very still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Muhammad Anim!&rdquo; she said, and she might have been wooing him. &ldquo;That was a
+      devil's trick!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was rather an astounding statement, coming from lovely lips in such a
+      setting. It was rather suggestive of a driver's whiplash, flicked through
+      the air for a beginning. Muhammad Anim continued glaring and did not
+      answer her, so in her own good time, when she had tossed her golden hair
+      back once or twice again, she developed her meaning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We who are free of Khinjan Caves do not send men out to bring recruits.
+      We know better than to bid our men tell lies for others at the gate. Nor,
+      seeking proof for our new recruit, do we send men to hunt a head for him--not
+      even those of us who have a lashkar that we call our own, mullah Muhammad
+      Anim. Each of us earns his own way in!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The mullah Muhammad Anim began to stroke his beard, but he made no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And--mullah Muhammad Anim, thou wandering man of God--when that
+      lashkar has foolishly been sent and has failed, is it written in the
+      Kalamullah saying we should pretend there was a head, and that the head
+      was stolen? A lie is a lie, Muhammad Anim! Wandering perhaps is good, if
+      in search of the way. Is it good to lose the way, and to lie, thou true
+      follower of the Prophet?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled, tossing her hair back. Her eyes challenged, her lips mocked
+      him and her chin scorned. The crowd breathed hard and watched. The mullah
+      muttered something in his beard, and sat down, and the crowd began to roar
+      applause at her. But she checked it with a regal gesture, and a glance of
+      contempt at the mullah that was alone worth a journey across the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo;
+       to see.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Guards!&rdquo; she said quietly. And the crowd's sigh then was like the night
+      wind in a forest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Away with those three of Muhammad Anim's men!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Twelve of the arena guards threw down their shields with a sudden clatter
+      and seized the prisoners, four to each. The crowd shivered with delicious
+      anticipation. The doomed men neither struggled nor cried, for fatalism is
+      an anodyne as well as an explosive. King set his teeth. Yasmini, with both
+      hands behind her head, continued to smile down on them all as sweetly as
+      the stars shine on a battle-field.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She nodded once; and then all was over in a minute. With a ringing &ldquo;Ho!&rdquo;
+       and a run, the guards lifted their victims shoulder high and bore them
+      forward. At the river bank they paused for a second to swing them. Then,
+      with another &ldquo;Ho!&rdquo; they threw them like dead rubbish into the swift black
+      water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was only one wild scream that went echoing and re-echoing to the
+      roof. There was scarcely a splash, and no extra ripple at all. No heads
+      came up again to gasp. No fingers clutched at the surface. The fearful
+      speed of the river sucked them under, to grind and churn and pound them
+      through long caverns underground and hurl them at last over the great
+      cataract toward the middle of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah-h-h-h-h!&rdquo; sighed the crowd in ecstasy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there no other stranger?&rdquo; asked Yasmini, searching for King again with
+      her amazing eyes. The skin all down his back turned there and then into
+      gooseflesh. And as her eyes met his she laughed like a bell at him. She
+      knew! She knew who he was, how he had entered, and how he felt. Not a
+      doubt of it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter XI
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Long slept the Heart o' the Hills, oh, long!
+     (Ye who have watched, ye know!)
+     As sap sleeps in the deodars
+     When winter shrieks and steely stars
+     Blink over frozen snow.
+     Ye haste? The sap stirs now, ye say?
+     Ye feel the pulse of spring?
+     But sap must rise ere buds may break,
+     Or cubs fare forth, or bees awake,
+     Or lean buck spurn the ling!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kurram Khan!&rdquo; the lashless mullah howled, like a lone wolf in the
+      moonlight, and King stood up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is one of the laws of Cocker, who wrote the S. S. Code, that a man is
+      alive until he is proved dead, and where there is life there is
+      opportunity. In that grim minute King felt heretical; but a man's feelings
+      are his own affair provided he can prove it, and he managed to seem about
+      as much at ease as a native hakim ought to feel at such an initiation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come forward!&rdquo; the mullah howled, and he obeyed, treading gingerly
+      between men who were at no pains to let him by, and silently blessing
+      them, because he was not really in any hurry at all. Yasmini looked lovely
+      from a distance, and life was sweet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who are his witnesses?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Witnesses?&rdquo; the roof hissed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I!&rdquo; shouted Ismail, jumping up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I!&rdquo; cracked the roof. &ldquo;I! I!&rdquo; So that for a second King almost believed
+      he had a crowd of men to swear for him and did not hear Darya Khan at all,
+      who rose from a place not very far behind where had sat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail followed him in a hurry, like a man wading a river with loose
+      clothes gathered in one arm and the other arm ready in case of falling. He
+      took much less trouble than King not to tread on people, and oaths' marked
+      his wake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Darya Khan did not go so fast. As he forced his way forward a man passed
+      him up the wooden box that King had used to stand on; he seized it in both
+      hands with a grin and a jest and went to stand behind King and Ismail, in
+      line with the lashless mullah, facing Yasmini. Yasmini smiled at them all
+      as if they were actors in her comedy, and she well pleased with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look ye!&rdquo; howled the mullah. &ldquo;Look ye and look well, for this is to be
+      one of us!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King felt ten thousand eyes burn holes in his back, but the one pair of
+      eyes that mocked him from the bridge was more disconcerting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Turn, Kurram Khan! Turn that all may see!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Feeling like a man on a spit, he revolved slowly. By the time he had
+      turned once completely around, besides knowing positively that one of the
+      two bracelets on her right arm was the one he had worn, or else its exact
+      copy, he knew that he was not meant to die yet; for his eyes could work
+      much more swiftly than the horn-rimmed spectacles made believe. He decided
+      that Yasmini meant he should be frightened, but not much hurt just yet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he ceased altogether to feel frightened and took care to look more
+      scared than ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who paid the price of thy admission?&rdquo; the mullah howled, and King cleared
+      his throat, for he was not quite sure yet what that might mean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Speak, Kurram Khan!&rdquo; Yasmini purred, smiling her loveliest. &ldquo;Tell them
+      whom you slew.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King turned and faced the crowd, raising himself on the balls of his feet
+      to shout, like a man facing thousands of troops on parade. He nearly gave
+      himself away, for habit had him unawares. A native hakim, given the
+      stoutest lungs in all India, would not have shouted in that way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cappitin Attleystan King!&rdquo; he roared. And he nearly jumped out of his
+      skin when his own voice came rattling back at him from the roof overhead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cappitin Attleystan King!&rdquo; it answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yasmini chuckled as a little rill will sometimes chuckle among ferns. It
+      was devilish. It seemed to say there were traps not far ahead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where was he slain?&rdquo; asked the mullah.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the Khyber Pass,&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the Khyber Pass!&rdquo; the roof whispered hoarsely, as if aghast at such
+      cold-bloodedness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now give proof!&rdquo; said the mullah. &ldquo;Words at the gate--proof in the
+      cavern! Without good proof, there is only one way out of here!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Proof!&rdquo; the crowd thundered. &ldquo;Proof!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Proof! Proof! Proof!&rdquo; the roof echoed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no need for Darya Khan to whisper. King's hands were behind him,
+      and he had seen what he had seen and guessed what he had guessed while he
+      was turning to let the crowd look at him. His fingers closed on human
+      hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, it is short!&rdquo; hissed Darya Khan. &ldquo;Take the two ears, or hold it by
+      the jawbone! Hold it high in both hands!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King obeyed, without looking at the thing, and Ismail, turning to face the
+      crowd, rose on tiptoe and filled his lungs for the effort of his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The head of Cappitin Attleystan King--infidel kaffir--British
+      arrficer!&rdquo; he howled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; the crowd bellowed. &ldquo;Good! Throw it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The crowd's roar and the roof's echoes combined until pandemonium.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Throw it to them, Kurram Khan!&rdquo; Yasmini purred from the bridge end,
+      speaking as softly and as sweetly, as if she coaxed a child. Yet her voice
+      carried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lowered the head, but instead of looking at it he looked up at her. He
+      thought she was enjoying herself and his predicament as he had never seen
+      any one enjoy anything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Throw it to them, Kurram Khan!&rdquo; she purred. &ldquo;It is the custom!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Throw it! Throw it!&rdquo; the crowd thundered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned the ghastly thing until it lay face-upward in his hands, and so
+      at last he saw it. He caught his breath, and only the horn-rimmed
+      spectacles, that he had cursed twice that night, saved him from
+      self-betrayal. The cavern seemed to sway, but he recovered and his wits
+      worked swiftly. If Yasmini detected his nervousness she gave no sign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Throw it! Throw it! Throw it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The crowd was growing impatient. Many men were standing, waving their arms
+      to draw attention to themselves, and he wondered what the ultimate end of
+      the head would be, if he obeyed and threw it to them. Watching Yasmini's
+      eyes, he knew it had not entered her head that he might disobey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked past her toward the river. There were no guards near enough to
+      prevent what he intended; but he had to bear in mind that the guards had
+      rifles, and if he acted too suddenly one of them might shoot at him
+      unbidden. They were wondrous free with their cartridges, those guards, in
+      a land where ammunition is worth its weight in silver coin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Holding the head before him with both hands, he began to walk toward the
+      river, edging all the while a little toward the crowd as if meaning to get
+      nearer before he threw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was much more than half-way to the river's edge before Yasmini or
+      anybody else divined his true intention. The mullah grew suspicions first
+      and yelled. Then King hurried, for he did not believe Yasmini would need
+      many seconds in which to regain command of any situation. But she saw fit
+      to stand still and watch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He reached the river and stood there. Now he was in no hurry at all, for
+      it stood to reason that unless Yasmini very much desired him to be kept
+      alive he would have been shot dead already. For a moment the crowd was so
+      interested that it forgot to bark and snarl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His next move was as deliberate as he could make it, although he was
+      careful to avoid the least suggestion of mummery (for then the crowd would
+      have suspected disloyalty to Islam, and the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; are very, very pious,
+      and very suspicious of all foreign ritual).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did a thoughtful simple thing that made every savage who watched him
+      gasp because of its very unexpectedness. He held the head in both hands,
+      threw it far out into the river and stood to watch it sink. Then, without
+      visible emotion of any kind, he walked back stolidly to face Yasmini at
+      the bridge end, with shoulders a little more stubborn now than they ought
+      to be, and chin a shade too high, for there never was a man who could act
+      quite perfectly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou fool!&rdquo; Yasmini whispered through lips that did not move.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She betrayed a flash of temper like a trapped she-tiger's, but followed it
+      instantly with her loveliest smile. Like to like, however, the crowd saw
+      the flash of temper and took its cue from that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Slay him!&rdquo; yelled a lone voice, that was greeted an approving murmur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Slay him!&rdquo; advised the roof in a whisper, in one of its phonetic tricks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is a darbar!&rdquo; Yasmini announced in a rising, ringing voice. &ldquo;My
+      darbar, for I summoned it! Did I invite any man to speak?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was silence, as a whipped unwilling pack is silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Speak, thou, Kurram Khan!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Knowing the custom--having
+      heard the order to throw that trophy to them--why act otherwise?
+      Explain!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing in the wide world could be fairer! She left him to extricate
+      himself from a mess of his own making! It was more than fair, for she went
+      out of her way to offer him an opening to jump through. And she paid him
+      the compliment of suggesting be must be clever enough to take it, for she
+      seemed to expect a satisfying answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell them why!&rdquo; she said, smiling. No man could have guessed by the tone
+      of her voice whether she was for him or against him, and the crowd,
+      beginning again to whisper, watched to see which way the cat would jump.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He bowed low to her three times--very low indeed and very slowly, for
+      he had to think. Then he turned his back and repeated the obeisance to the
+      crowd. Still he could think of no excuse, except Cocker's Rule No. I for
+      Tight Places, and all the world knows that because Solomon said much the
+      same thing first:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A soft answer is better than a sword!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Cocker adds, &ldquo;Never excuse. Explain! And blame no man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My brothers,&rdquo; he said, and paused, since a man must make a beginning,
+      even when he can not see the end. And as he spoke the answer came to him.
+      He stood upright, and his voice became that of a man whose advice has been
+      asked, and who gives it freely. &ldquo;These be stirring times! Ye need take
+      care, my brothers! Ye saw this night how one man entered here on the
+      strength of an oath and a promise. All he lacked was proof. And I had
+      proof. Ye saw! Who am I that I should deny you a custom? Yet--think
+      ye, my brothers!--how easy would it not have been, had I thrown that
+      head to you, for a traitor to catch it and hide it in his clothes, and
+      make away with it! He could have used it to admit to these caves--why--even
+      an Englishman, my brothers! If that had happened, ye would have blamed
+      me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Yasmini smiled. Taking its cue from her, the crowd murmured, scarcely
+      assent, but rather recognition of the hakim's adroitness. The game was not
+      won; there lacked a touch to tip the scales in his favor, and Yasmini
+      supplied it with ready genius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The hakim speaks truth!&rdquo; she laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King turned about instantly to face her, but he salaamed so low that she
+      could not have seen his expression had she tried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If Ye wish it, I will order him tossed into Earth's Drink after those
+      other three.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Muhammed Anim rose stroking his beard and rocking where he stood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the law!&rdquo; he growled, and King shuddered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the law,&rdquo; Yasmini answered in a voice that rang with pride and
+      insolence, &ldquo;that none interrupt me while I speak! For such ill-mannered
+      ones Earth's Drink hungers! Will you test my authority, Muhammad Anim?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The mullah sat down, and hundreds of men laughed at him, but not all of
+      the men by any means.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the law that none goes out of Khinjan Cave alive who breaks the law
+      of the Caves. But he broke no very big law. And he spoke truth. Think Ye!
+      If that head had only fallen into Muhammad Anim's lap, the mullah might
+      have smuggled in another man with it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A roar of laughter greeted that thrust. Many men who had not laughed at
+      the mullah's first discomfiture, joined in now. Muhammad Anim sat and
+      fidgeted, meeting nobody's eye and answering nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So it seems to me good,&rdquo; Yasmini said, in a voice that did not echo any
+      more but rang very clear and true (she seemed to know the trick of the
+      roof, and to use the echo or not as she chose), &ldquo;to let this hakim live!
+      He shall meditate in his cave a while, and perhaps he shall be beaten,
+      lest he dare offend again. He can no more escape from Khinjan Caves than
+      the women who are prisoners here. He may therefore live!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was utter silence. Men looked at one another and at her, and her
+      blazing eyes searched the crowd swiftly. It was plain enough that there
+      were at least two parties there, and that none dared oppose Yasmini's will
+      for fear of the others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To thy seat, Kurram Khan!&rdquo; she ordered, when she had waited a full minute
+      and no man spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wasted no time. He hurried out of the arena as fast as he could walk,
+      with Ismail and Darya Khan close at his heels. It was like a run out of
+      danger in a dream. He stumbled over the legs of the front-rank men in his
+      hurry to get back to his place, and Ismail overtook him, seized him by the
+      shoulders, hugged him, and dragged him to the empty seat next to the
+      Orakzai Pathan. There he hugged him until his ribs cracked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ready o' wit!&rdquo; he crowed. &ldquo;Ready o' tongue! Light o' life! Man after mine
+      own heart! Hey, I love thee! Readily I would be thy man, but for being
+      hers! Would I had a son like thee! Fool--fool--fool not to throw
+      the head to them! Squeamish one! Man like a child! What is the head but
+      earth when the life has left it? What would thy head be without the nimble
+      wit? Fool--fool--fool! And clever! Turned the joke on Muhammad
+      Anim! Turned it on Bull-with-a-beard in a twinkling--in the bat of an
+      eye--in a breath! Turned it against her enemy and raised a laugh
+      against him from his own men! Ready o' wit! Shameless one! Lucky one!
+      Allah was surely good to thee!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Still exulting, he let go, but none too soon for comfort. King's ribs were
+      sore from his hugging for days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; he asked. For King seemed to be shaping words with his lips.
+      He bent a great hairy ear to listen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have they taken Ali Masjid Fort?&rdquo; King whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How should I know? Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me, man, if you love me! Have they taken it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, how should I know? Ask her! She knows more than any man knows!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King turned to ask the same question of his friend the Orakzai Pathan; but
+      the Pathan would have none of his questions, he was busy listening for
+      whispers from the crowd, watching with both eyes, and he shoved King
+      aside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The crowd was very far from being satisfied. An angry murmur had begun to
+      fill the cavern as a hive is filled with the song of bees at swarming
+      time. But even so, surmise what one might, it was not easy to persuade the
+      eye that Yasmini's careless smile and easy poise were assumed. If she
+      recognized indignation and feared it, she disguised her fear amazingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King saw her whisper to a guard. The fellow nodded and passed his shield
+      to another man. He began to make his way in no great hurry toward the edge
+      of the arena. She whispered again and standing forward with their trumpets
+      seven of the guards blew a blast that split across the cavern like the
+      trump of doom; and as its hundred thousand echoes died in the roof, the
+      hum of voices died, too, and the very sound of breathing. The gurgling of
+      water became as if the river flowed in solitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leisurely then, languidly, she raised both arms until she looked like an
+      angel poised for flight. The little jewels stitched to her gauzy dress
+      twinkled like fire-flies as she moved. The crowd gasped sharply. She had
+      it by the heart-strings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She called, and four guards got under one shield, bowing their heads and
+      resting the great rim on their shoulders. They carried it beneath her and
+      stood still. With a low delicious laugh, sweet and true, she sprang on it,
+      and the shield scarcely trembled; she seemed lighter than the silk her
+      dress was woven from!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They carried her so, looking as if she and the shield were carved of a
+      piece, and by a master such as has not often been. And in the midst of the
+      arena before they had ceased moving she began to sing, with her head
+      thrown back and bosom swelling like a bird's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The East would ever rather draw its own conclusions from a hint let fall
+      than be puzzled by what the West believes are facts. And parables are not
+      good evidence in courts of law, which is always a consideration. So her
+      song took the form of a parable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And to say that she took hold of them and played rhapsodies of her own
+      making on their heart-strings would be to undervalue what she did. They
+      were dumb while she sang, but they rose at her. Not a force in the world
+      could have kept them down, for she was deftly touching cords that stirred
+      other forces--subtle, mysterious, mesmeric, which the old East
+      understands--which Muhammad the Prophet understood when he harnessed
+      evil in the shafts with men and wrote rules for their driving in a book.
+      They rose in silence and stood tense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While she sang, the guard to whom she had whispered forced a way through
+      the ranks of the standing crowd, and came behind Ismail. He tweaked the
+      Afridi's ear to draw attention, for like all the others--like King,
+      too--Ismail was listening with dropped jaw and watching with burning
+      eyes. For a minute they whispered, so low that King did not hear what they
+      said; and then the guard forced his way back by the shortest route to the
+      arena, knocking down half a dozen men and gaining safety beyond the lamps
+      before his victims could draw knife and follow him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yasmini's song went on, verse after verse, telling never one fact, yet
+      hinting unutterable things in a language that was made for hint and
+      metaphor and parable and innuendo. What tongue did not hint at was
+      conveyed by subtle gesture and a smile and flashing eyes. It was perfectly
+      evident that she knew more than King--more than the general at
+      Peshawur--more than the viceroy at Simla--probably more than the
+      British government--concerning what was about to happen in Islam. The
+      others might guess. She knew. It was just as evident that she would not
+      tell. The whole of her song, and it took her twenty minutes by the count
+      of King's pulse, to sing it, was a warning to wait and a promise of
+      amazing things to come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sang of a wolf-pack gathering from the valleys in the winter snow--a
+      very hungry wolf-pack. Then of a stalled ox, grown very fat from being
+      cared for. Of the &ldquo;Heart of the Hills&rdquo; that awoke in the womb of the
+      &ldquo;Hills,&rdquo; and that listened and watched.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, is she the 'Heart of the Hills'?&rdquo; King wondered. The rumors men had
+      heard and told again in India, about the &ldquo;Heart of the Hills&rdquo; in Khinjan
+      seemed to have foundation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought of the strange knife, wrapped in a handkerchief under his
+      shirt, with its bronze blade and gold hilt in the shape of a woman
+      dancing. The woman dancing was astonishingly like Yasmini, standing on the
+      shield!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sang about the owners of the stalled ox, who were busy at bay,
+      defending themselves and their ox from another wolf-pack in another
+      direction &ldquo;far beyond.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She urged them to wait a little while. The ox was big enough and fat
+      enough to nourish all the wolves in the world for many seasons. Let them
+      wait, then, until another, greater wolf-pack joined them, that they might
+      go hunting all together, overwhelm its present owners and devour the ox!
+      So urged the &ldquo;Heart of the Hills,&rdquo; speaking to the mountain wolves,
+      according to Yasmini's song.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;The little cubs in the burrows know.
+        Are ye grown wolves, who hurry so?&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      She paused, for effect; but they gave tongue then because they could not
+      help it, and the cavern shook to their terrific worship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Allah! Allah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They summoned God to come and see the height and depth and weight of their
+      allegiance to her! And because for their thunder there was no more chance
+      of being heard, she dropped from the shield like a blossom. No sound of
+      falling could have been heard in all that din, but one could see she made
+      no sound. The shield-bearers ran back to the bridge and stood below it,
+      eyes agape.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rewa Gunga spoke truth in Delhi when he assured King he should some day
+      wonder at Yasmini's dancing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She became joy and bravery and youth! She danced a story for them of the
+      things they knew. She was the dawn light, touching the distant peaks. She
+      was the wind that follows it, sweeping among the junipers and kissing each
+      as she came. She was laughter, as the little children laugh when the
+      cattle are loosed from the byres at last to feed in the valleys. She was
+      the scent of spring uprising. She was blossom. She was fruit! Very
+      daughter of the sparkle of warm sun on snow, she was the &ldquo;Heart of the
+      Hills&rdquo; herself!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Never was such dancing! Never such an audience! Never such mad applause!
+      She danced until the great rough guards had to run round the arena with
+      clubbed butts and beat back trespassers who would have mobbed her. And
+      every movement--every gracious wonder-curve and step with which she
+      told her tale was as purely Greek as the handle on King's knife and the
+      figures on the lamp-bowls and as the bracelets on her arm. Greek!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she half-modern-Russian, ex-girl-wife of a semi-civilized Hill-rajah!
+      Who taught her? There is nothing new, even in Khinjan, in the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo;!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when the crowd defeated the arena guards at last and burst through the
+      swinging butts to seize and fling her high and worship her with mad
+      barbaric rite, she ran toward the shield. The four men raised it
+      shoulder-high again. She went to it like a leaf in the wind--sprang
+      on it as if wings had lifted her, scarce touching it with naked toes--and
+      leapt to the bridge with a laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She went over the bridge on tiptoes, like nothing else under heaven but
+      Yasmini at her bewitchingest. And without pausing on the far side she
+      danced up the hewn stone stairs, dived into the dark hole and was gone!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; yelled Ismail in King's ear. He could have heard nothing less, for
+      the cavern was like to burst apart from the tumult.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whither?&rdquo; the Afridi shouted in disgust. &ldquo;Does the wind ask whither? Come
+      like the wind and see! They will remember next that they have a bone to
+      pick with thee! Come away!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That seemed good enough advice. He followed as fast as Ismail could
+      shoulder a way out between the frantic Hillmen, deafened, stupefied,
+      numbed, almost cowed by the ovation they were giving their &ldquo;Heart of their
+      Hills.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter XII
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     A scorpion in a corner stings himself to death.
+     A coward blames the gods. They laugh and let him die
+     A man goes forward
+     --Native Proverb
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      As they disappeared after a scramble through the mouth of the same tunnel
+      they had entered by, a roar went up behind them like the birth of
+      earthquakes. Looking back over his shoulder, King saw Yasmini come back
+      into the hole's mouth, to stand framed in it and bow acknowledgment. She
+      looked so ravishing in contrast to the huge grim wall, and the black
+      river, and the darkness at her back, that Khinjan's thousands tried to
+      storm the bridge and drag her down to them. The guards were hard put to
+      it, with their backs to the bridge end, for two or three minutes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Ismail would not let him wait and watch from there. He dragged him
+      down the tunnel and pushed him up on to a ledge where they could both see
+      without being seen, through a fissure in the rock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the space of five minutes Yasmini stood in the great hole, smiling and
+      watching the struggle below. Then she went, and the guards began to get
+      the best of it, because the crowd's enthusiasm waned when they could see
+      her no more. Then suddenly the guards began to loose random volleys at the
+      roof and brought down hundredweights of splintered stalactite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within a minute there were a hundred men busy sweeping up the
+      splinters. In another minute twenty Zakka Khels had begun a sword dance,
+      yelling like the damned. A hundred joined them. In three minutes more the
+      whole arena was a dinning whirlpool, and the river's voice was drowned in
+      shouting and the stamping of naked feet on stone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; urged Ismail, and led the way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King's last impression was of earth's womb on fire and of hellions brewing
+      wrath. The stalactites and the hurrying river multiplied the dancing
+      lights into a million, and the great roof hurled the din down again to
+      make confusion with the new din coming up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail went like a rat down a run, and King failed to overtake him until
+      he found him in the cave of the slippers kicking to right and left at
+      random.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Choose a good pair!&rdquo; he growled. &ldquo;Let late-comers fight for what is left!
+      Nay, I have thine! Choose thou the next best!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The statement being one of fact, and that no time or place for a quarrel
+      with the only friend in sight, King picked out the best slippers he could
+      see. The instant he had them on Ismail was off again, running like the
+      wind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had no torch. They left the little tunnel lamps behind. It became so
+      dark that King had to follow by ear, and so it happened that he missed
+      seeing where the tunnel forked. He imagined they were running back toward
+      the ledge under the waterfall; yet, when Ismail called a halt at last,
+      panting, groped behind a great rock for a lamp and lit the wick with a
+      common safety match, they were in a cave he had never seen before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where are we?&rdquo; King asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where none dare seek us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail held the lamp high, shielding its wick with a hollowed palm and
+      peering about him as if in doubt, his ragged beard looking like smoke in
+      the wind; for a wind blew down all the passages in Khinjan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King examined the lamp. It was of bronze and almost as surely ancient
+      Greek as it surely was not Indian. There were figures graven on the bowl
+      representing a woman dancing, who looked not unlike Yasmini; but before he
+      had time to look very closely Ismail blew the lamp out and was off again,
+      like a shadow shot into its mother night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Confused by the sudden darkness King crashed into a rock as he tried to
+      follow. Ismail turned back and gave him the end of a cotton girdle that he
+      unwound from his waist; then he plunged ahead again into Cimmerian
+      blackness, down a passage so narrow that they could touch a wall with
+      either hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once he shouted back to duck, and they passed under a low roof where
+      water dripped on them, and the rock underfoot was the bed of a shallow
+      stream. After that the track began to rise, and the grade grew so steep
+      that even Ismail, the furious, had to slacken pace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They began to climb up titanic stairways all in the dark, feeling their
+      way through fissures in a mountain's framework, up zigzag ledges, and over
+      great broken lumps of rock from one cave to another; until at last in one
+      great cave Ismail stopped and relit the lamp. Hunting about with its aid
+      he found an imported &ldquo;hurricane&rdquo; lantern and lit that, leaving the bronze
+      lamp in its place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soon after that they lost sight of walls to their left for a time,
+      although there were no stars, nor any light to suggest the outer world--nothing
+      but wind. The wind blew a hurricane.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their path now was a very narrow ledge formed by a crack that ran
+      diagonally down the face of a black cliff on their right. They hugged the
+      stone because of a sense of fathomless space above--below--on
+      every side but one. The rock wall was the one thing tangible, and the
+      footing the crack in it afforded was the gift of God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The moaning wind rose to a shriek at intervals and made their clothes
+      flutter like ghosts' shrouds, and in spite of it King's shirt was drenched
+      with sweat, and his fingers ached from clinging as if they were on fire.
+      Crawling against the wind along a wider ledge at the top, they came to a
+      chasm, crossed by a foot-wide causeway. The wind bowled and moaned in it,
+      and the futile lantern rays only suggested unimaginable, things--death
+      the least of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Art thou afraid?&rdquo; asked Ismail, holding the lantern to King's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kuch dar nahin hai!&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;There is no such thing as fear!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a bold answer, and Ismail laughed, knowing well that neither of
+      them believed a word of it at that moment. Only, each thought better of
+      the other, that the one should have cared to ask, and that the other
+      should be willing to give the lie to a fear that crawled and could be
+      felt. Too many men are willing to admit they are afraid. Too many would
+      rather condemn and despise than ask and laugh. But it is on the edges of
+      eternity that men find each other out, and sympathize.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail went down on his hands and knees, lifting the lantern along a foot
+      at a time in front of him and carrying it in his teeth by the bail the
+      last part of the way. It seemed like an hour before he stood up, nearly a
+      hundred yards away on the far side, and yelled for King to follow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wind snatched the yells away, but the waving lantern beckoned him, and
+      King knelt down in the dark. It happened that he laid his hand on a loose
+      stone, the size of his head, near the edge. He shoved it over and
+      listened. He listened for a minute but did not hear it strike anything,
+      and the shudder, that he could not repress, came from the middle of his
+      backbone and spread outward through each fiber of his being. If he had
+      delayed another second his courage would have failed; he began at once to
+      crawl to where Ismail stood swinging the light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was room on the ledge for his knees and no more. Toes and fingers
+      were overside. He sat down as on horseback, and transferred both slippers
+      to his pockets, and then went forward again with bare feet, waiting
+      whenever the wind snatched at him with redoubled fury, to lean against it
+      and grip the rock with numb fingers. Ismail swung the lamp, for reasons
+      best known to himself, and half-way over King sat astride the ridge again
+      to shout to him to hold it still. But Ismail did not understand him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Khinjan graves are deep!&rdquo; he howled back. &ldquo;Fear and the shadow of death
+      are one!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He swung the lamp even more violently, as if it were a charm that could
+      exorcise fear and bring a man over safely. The shadows danced until his
+      brain reeled, and King swore he would thrash the fool as soon as he could
+      reach him. He lay belly-downward on the rock and crawled like an insect
+      the remainder of the way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as if aware of his intention Ismail started to hurry on while there
+      was yet a yard or two to crawl, and anger not being a load worth carrying,
+      nor revenge a thing permitted to interfere with the sirkar's business,
+      King let both die.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hunted by the wind, they ran round a bold shoulder of cliff into another
+      black-dark tunnel. There the wind died, swallowed in a hundred fissures,
+      but the track grew worse and steeper until they had to cling with both
+      hands and climb and now and then Ismail set the lantern on a ledge and
+      lowered his girdle to help King up. Sometimes he stood on King's shoulder
+      in order to reach a higher level. They climbed for an hour and dropped at
+      last panting, on a ledge, after squeezing themselves under the corner of a
+      boulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lantern light shone on a tiny trickle of cold water, and there Ismail
+      drank deep, like a bull, before signing to King to imitate him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A thirsty throat and a crazy head are one,&rdquo; he counseled. &ldquo;A man needs
+      wit and a wet tongue who would talk with her!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is she?&rdquo; asked King, when he had finished drinking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go and look!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail gave him a sudden shove, that sent him feet first forward over the
+      edge. He fell a distance rather greater than his own height, to another
+      ledge and stood there looking up. He could see Ismail's red-rimmed eyes
+      blinking down at him in the lantern light, but suddenly the Afridi blew
+      the lamp out, and then the darkness became solid. Thought itself left off
+      less than a yard away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ismail!&rdquo; he whispered. But Ismail did not answer him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He faced about, leaning against the rock, with the flat of both hands
+      pressed tight against it for the sake of its company; and almost at once
+      he saw a little bright red light glowing in the distance. It might have
+      been a hundred yards, and it might have been a mile away below him; it was
+      perfectly impossible to judge, for the darkness was not measurable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Flowers turn to the light!&rdquo; droned Ismail's voice above sententiously,
+      and turning, he thought he could see red eyes peering over the rock. He
+      jumped, and made a grab for the flowing beard that surely must be below
+      them, but he missed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Little fish swim to the light!&rdquo; droned Ismail. &ldquo;Moths fly to the light!
+      Who is a man that he should know less than they?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned again and stared at the light. Dimly, very vaguely be could make
+      out that a causeway led downward from almost where he stood. He was
+      convinced that should he try to climb back Ismail would merely reach out a
+      hand and shove him down again, and there was no sense in being put to that
+      indignity. He decided to go forward, for there was even less sense in
+      standing still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come with me! Come along, Ismail!&rdquo; he called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Allah! Hear him! Nay, nay, nay! Who was it said a little while ago,
+      'There is no such thing as fear!' I am afraid, but thou and I are two men!
+      Go thou alone!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Reason is a man's only dependable faculty. Reason told him that at a word
+      from Yasmini he would have been flung into &ldquo;Earth's Drink&rdquo; hours ago.
+      Therefore, added reason, why should she forego that spectacular
+      opportunity when his death would have amused Khinjan's thousands, only to
+      kill him now in the dark alone? He had treated a few dozen sick men,
+      surely she had not been afraid to offend them. Had she not dared forbid
+      the sick coming to him altogether? &ldquo;Forward!&rdquo; says Cocker, in at least a
+      dozen places. &ldquo;Go forward and find out! Better a bed in hell than a seat
+      on the horns of a dilemma! Forward!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no sound now anywhere. He stretched a leg downward and felt a
+      rock two or three feet lower down, and the sound of his slipper sole
+      touching it, being the only noise, made the short hair rise on the back of
+      his neck. Then he took himself, so to speak, by the hand and went forward
+      and downward, for action is the only curb imagination knows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He forgot to count his pulse and judge how long it took him to descend
+      that causeway in the dark. It was not so very rough, nor so very
+      dangerous, but of course he only knew that fact afterward. He had to grope
+      his way inch by inch, trusting to sense of touch and the British army's
+      everlasting luck, with an eye all the while on a red light that was
+      something like the glow through hell's keyhole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he reached bottom, after perhaps twenty minutes, and stood at last on
+      comparatively level rock, his legs were trembling from tension, and he had
+      to sit down while he stretched them out and rested. The light still looked
+      a quarter of a mile away, although that was guesswork. It made scarcely
+      more impression on the surrounding darkness than one coal glowing in a
+      cellar. The silence began to make his head ache.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up and started forward, but just as he did that he thought he heard
+      a footstep. He suspected Ismail might be following after all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ismail!&rdquo; he called, trying to peer through the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But all the darkness had its home there. He could not even see his own
+      hand stretched out. His own voice made him jump; after a second's pause it
+      began to crack and rattle from wall to wall and from roof to floor, until
+      at last the echoing word became one again and died with a hiss somewhere
+      in the bowels of the world--Mbisssss!--like the sound of hot
+      iron being plunged into a blacksmith's trough with a little after-murmur
+      of complaining water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But then he was sure he heard a footstep! He faced about; and now there
+      were two red lights where there had been only one. They seemed rather
+      nearer, perhaps because there were two of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hullo, King sahib!&rdquo; said a voice he recognized; and he choked. He felt
+      that if he had coughed his heart would have lain on the floor!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you afraid, King sahib?&rdquo; said the Rangar Rewa Gunga's voice, and he
+      took a step forward to be closer to his questioner. He found himself
+      beside a rock, looking up at the Rangar's turban, that peered over the top
+      of it. He could dimly make out the Rangar's dark eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would be afraid if I were you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rewa Gunga flashed a little electric torch into his eyes, but after a few
+      seconds he shifted it so that both their faces could be seen, although the
+      Rangar's only very faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have come to warn you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very good of you, I'm sure!&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If she knew I were here, she would jolly well have my liver nailed to a
+      wall! I come to advise you to go back!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have they taken Ali Masjid Fort?&rdquo; King asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never mind, sahib, but listen! I have brought her bracelet! I stole it!
+      She stole it from you, and I stole it back! Take it! Put it on and wear
+      it! Use it as a passport out of Khinjan Caves--for no man dare touch
+      you while you wear it--and as a passport down the Khyber into India!
+      Go back to India and stay there! Take it and go! Quick! Take it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, thanks!&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rangar laughed mirthlessly, shifting the light a little as King
+      stepped aside to get a better view of him. He held the torch more
+      cunningly than a Spanish lady holds a fan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All Englishmen are fools--most of them stiff-necked fools,&rdquo; he
+      asserted. &ldquo;Bah! Do you think I do not know? Do you think anything is
+      hidden from her? I know--and she knows--that you think you have
+      a surprise in store for her! You think you will go to her, and she will
+      say, 'King sahib, why did you throw that head into the river, and put me
+      in danger from my men?' And you will say, will you not, 'Princess, that
+      was my brother's head!'? Was that not what you intended? Is it not true?
+      Does she not know it? She knows more than you know, King sahib! Because
+      you showed me certain little courtesies, I have come to warn you to run
+      away!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you suppose she knows you are here?&rdquo; King asked, and the Rangar
+      laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If she knows so much, and is able to read my mind from a distance, where
+      does she suppose you are?&rdquo; King insisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rangar laughed again, leaning his chin on both fists and switching out
+      the light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps she sent me to warn you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said King, &ldquo;my brother commanded at Ali Masjid Fort. There are
+      things I must ask her. How did she know that head was my brother's? What
+      part had she in taking it from his shoulders? What did she mean by that
+      song of hers?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rangar chuckled softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are no fools in the world like Englishmen! Listen! You are being
+      offered life and liberty! Here is the key to both!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made the gold bracelet ring on the rock by way of explanation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take the key and go!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well, sahib! Hear the other side of it! Beyond those two red lights
+      there is a curtain. This side of that curtain you are Athelstan King of
+      the Khyber Rifles, or Kurram Khan, or whatever you care to call yourself.
+      Beyond it, you are what she calls you! Choose!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King did not answer, so he continued after a pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You shall pass behind that curtain, if you insist. Beyond it you shall
+      know what she knows about Ali Masjid and your brother's head! You shall
+      know all that she knows! There shall be no secrets between you and her!
+      She shall translate the meaning of her song to you! But you shall never
+      come out again King of the Khyber Rifles, or Kurram Khan! If you ever come
+      out again, it shall be as you never dreamed, bearing arms you never saw
+      yet, and you shall cut with your own hand the ties that bind you to
+      England! Choose!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I chose long ago,&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are the gentle English never serious?&rdquo; the Rangar asked. &ldquo;Will you not
+      understand that if you pass that curtain you shall know all things that
+      Yasmini knows, but that you shall cease to be yourself? Cease--to--be--yourself!
+      Is my meaning clear?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not in the least,&rdquo; said King, &ldquo;but I hope mine is!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will go forward?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rewa Gunga made no answer to that, although King waited for an answer. For
+      about a minute there was no sound at all, except the beating of King's
+      heart. Then he moved to try and see the Rangar's turban above the rock. He
+      could not see it. He found a niche in the rock, set his foot in it and
+      mounted three or four feet, until his head was level with the top. The
+      Rangar was gone!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He listened for two or three minutes, but the silence began to make his
+      head ache again; so he stooped to feel the floor with his hand before
+      deciding to go forward. There was no mistaking the finish given by the
+      tread of countless feet. He was on a highway, and there are not often
+      pitfalls where so many feet have been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For all that he went forward as a certain Agag once did, and it was many
+      minutes before he could see a curtain glowing blood-red in the light
+      behind the two lamps, at the top of a flight of ten stone steps. It was
+      peculiar to him and to his service that he counted the steps before going
+      nearer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he went quite close he saw carpet down the middle of the steps, so
+      ancient that the stone showed through in places; all the pattern,
+      supposing it ever had any, was worn or faded away. Carpet and steps glowed
+      red too. His own face, and the hands he held in front of him were
+      red-hot-poker color. Yet outside the little ellipse of light the darkness
+      looked like a thing to lean against, and the silence was so intense that
+      he could hear the arteries singing by his ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw the curtains move slightly, apparently in a little puff of wind
+      that made the lamps waver. He was very nearly sure he heard a footfall
+      beyond the curtains and a tinkle--as of a tiny silver bell, or a
+      jewel striking against another one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He kicked his slippers off, because there are no conditions under which
+      bad manners ever are good policy. Wide history and Cocker's famous code.
+      Then he walked up the steps without treading on the carpet, because living
+      scorpions have been known to be placed under carpets on purpose on
+      occasion. And at the top, being a Secret Service man, he stooped to
+      examine the lamps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were bronze, cast, polished and graved. All round the circumference
+      of each bowl were figures in half-relief, representing a woman dancing.
+      She was the woman of the knife-hilt, and of the lamps in the arena! She
+      looked like Yasmini! Only she could not be Yasmini because these lamps
+      were so ancient and so rare that he had never seen any in the least like
+      them, although he had visited most of the museums of the East.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both lamps were alike, for he crossed over to make sure and took each in
+      his hands in turn. But no two figures of the dance were alike on either.
+      It was the same woman dancing, but the artist had chosen twenty different
+      poses with which to immortalize his skill, and hers. Both lamps burned
+      sweet oil with a wick, and each had a chimney of horn, not at all unlike a
+      modern lamp-chimney. The horn was stained red.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he set the second lamp down he became aware of a subtle interesting
+      smell, and memory took back at once to Yasmini's room in the Chandni Chowk
+      in Delhi where he had smelled it first. It was the peculiar scent he had
+      been told was Yasmini's own--a blend of scents, like a chord of
+      music, in which musk did not predominate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took three strides and touched the curtains, discovering now for the
+      first time that there were two of them, divided down the middle. They were
+      about eight feet high, and each three feet wide, of leather, and though
+      they looked old as the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; themselves the leather was supple as good
+      cloth. They had once been decorated with figures in gold leaf, but only a
+      little patch of yellow here and there remained to hint at faded glories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He decided to remember his manners again, and at least to make opportunity
+      for an invitation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kurram Khan hai!&rdquo; he announced, forgetting the echo. But the echo was the
+      only answer. It cackled at him, cracking back and forth down the cavern to
+      die with a groan in illimitable darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kurram-urram-urram-urram-urram-ahn-hai! Urram-urram-urram-urram-ahn-hai!
+      Urram-urram-urram-ah-hh-ough-ah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no sound beyond the curtains. No answer. Only he thought the
+      strange scent grew stronger. He decided to go forward. With his heart in
+      his mouth he parted the curtains with both hands, startled by the sharp
+      jangle of metal rings on a rod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he stood, with arms outstretched, staring--staring--staring--with
+      eyes skilled swiftly to take in details, but with a brain that tried to
+      explain--formed a hundred wild suggestions--and then reeled. He
+      was face to face with the unexplainable--the riddle of Khinjan Caves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter XIII
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Grand was thy goal! Thy vision new!
+             Ave, Caesar!
+     Conquest?  Ends of Earth thy view?
+             Ave, Caesar!
+     To sow--to reap--to play God's game?
+     How many Caesars did that same
+     Until the great, grim Reaper came!
+     Who ploughs with death shall garner rue,
+     And under all skies is nothing new.
+             Vale, Caesar!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Telling the story afterward King never made any effort to describe his own
+      sensations. It was surely enough to state what he saw, after a breathless
+      climb among the rat-runs of a mountain with his imagination fired already
+      by what had happened in the Cavern of Earth's Drink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The leather curtains slipped through his fingers and closed behind him
+      with the clash of rings on a rod. But he was beyond being startled. He was
+      not really sure he was in the world. He knew he was awake, and he knew he
+      was glad he had left his shoes outside. But he was not certain whether it
+      was the twentieth century, or fifty-five B. C., or earlier yet; or whether
+      time had ceased. Very vividly in that minute there flashed before his mind
+      Mark Twain's suggestion of the Transposition of Epochs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The place where he was did not look like a cave, but a palace chamber, for
+      the rock walls had been trimmed square and polished smooth; then they had
+      been painted pure white, except for a wide blue frieze, with a line of
+      gold-leaf drawn underneath it. And on the frieze, done in gold-leaf too,
+      was the Grecian lady of the lamps, always dancing. There were fifty or
+      sixty figures of her, no two the same.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A dozen lamps were burning, set in niches cut in the walls at measured
+      intervals. They were exactly like the two outside, except that their horn
+      chimneys were stained yellow instead of red, suffusing everything in a
+      golden glow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Opposite him was a curtain, rather like that through which he had entered.
+      Near to the curtain was a bed, whose great wooden posts were cracked with
+      age. And it was at the bed he stared, with eyes that took in every detail
+      but refused to believe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In spite of its age it was spread with fine new linen. Richly embroidered,
+      not very ancient Indian draperies hung down from it to the floor on either
+      side. On it, above the linen, a man and a woman lay hand-in-hand; and the
+      woman was so exactly like Yasmini, even to her clothing, and her naked
+      feet, that it was not possible for a man to be self-possessed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They both seemed asleep. It was as if Yasmini, weary from the dancing, had
+      laid herself to sleep beside her lord. But who was he? And why did he wear
+      Roman armor? And why was there no guard to keep intruders out?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was minutes before he satisfied himself that the man's breast did not
+      rise and fall under the bronze armor and that the woman's jeweled gauzy
+      stuff was still. Imagination played such tricks with him that in the
+      stillness he imagined he heard breathing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After he was sure they were both dead, he went nearer, but it was a minute
+      yet before he knew the woman was not she. At first a wild thought
+      possessed him that she had killed herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The only thing to show who he had been were the letters S. P. Q. R. on a
+      great plumed helmet, on a little table by the bed. But she was the woman
+      of the lamp-bowls and the frieze. A life-size stone statue in a corner was
+      so like her, and like Yasmini too, that it was difficult to decide which
+      of the two it represented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had lived when he did, for her fingers were locked in his. And he had
+      lived two thousand years ago, because his armor was about as old as that,
+      and for proof that he had died in it part of his breast had turned to
+      powder inside the breastplate. The rest of his body was whole and
+      perfectly preserved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stern, handsome in a high-beaked Roman way, gray on the temples,
+      firm-lipped, he lay like an emperor in harness. But the pride and
+      resolution on his face were outdone by the serenity of hers. Very surely
+      those two had been lovers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something--he could not decide what--about the man's appearance
+      kept him staring for ten minutes, holding his breath unconsciously and
+      letting it out in little silent gasps. It annoyed him that he could not
+      pin down the elusive thing; and when he went on presently to be curious
+      about more tangible things, it was only to be faced with the unexplainable
+      at every turn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How had the bodies been preserved, for instance? They were perfect, except
+      for that one detail of the man's breast. The air was full of the perfume
+      he had learned to recognize as Yasmini's, but there was no sniff about the
+      bodies of pitch or bitumen, or of any other chemical. Nor was there any
+      sign of violence about them, or means of telling how they died, or when,
+      except for the probable date of the man's armor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both of them looked young and healthy--the woman younger than thirty--twenty-five
+      at a guess--and the man perhaps forty, perhaps forty-five.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He bent over them. Every stitch of the man's clothing had decayed in the
+      course of centuries, so that his armor rested on the naked skin, except
+      for a dressed leather kilt about his middle. The leather was as old as the
+      curtains at the entrance, and as well preserved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the woman's silken clothing was as new as the bedding; and that was so
+      new that it had been woven in Belfast, Ireland, by machinery and bore the
+      mark of the firm that made it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet, they both died at about the same time, or how could their fingers
+      have been interlaced? And some of the jewelry on the woman's clothes was
+      very ancient as well as priceless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked closer at the fingers for signs of force and suddenly caught his
+      breath. Under the woman's flimsy sleeve was a wrought gold bracelet,
+      smaller than that one he himself had worn in Delhi and up the Khyber--exactly
+      like the little one that Yasmini wore on her wrist in the Cavern of
+      Earth's Drink! He raised the loose sleeve to look more closely at it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sleeve overlay the man's forearm, and the movement laid bare another
+      bracelet, on the man's right wrist. Size for size, this was the same as
+      the one that had been stolen from himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Memory prompted him. He felt its outer edge with a finger-nail. There was
+      the little nick that he had made in the soft gold when he struck it
+      against the cell bars in the jail at the Mir Khan Palace!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That put another thought in his head. It was less than two hours since
+      Yasmini danced in the arena. It might well be much less than that since
+      she had taken off her bracelets. He laid a finger on the dead man's
+      stone-cold hand and let it rest so for a minute. Then, running it slowly
+      up the wrist, he touched the gold. It was warm. He repeated the test on
+      the woman's wrist. Hers was warm, too. Both bracelets had been worn by a
+      living being within an hour--
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Probably within minutes!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He muttered and frowned in thought, and then suddenly jumped backward. The
+      leather curtain near the bed had moved on its bronze rod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aren't they dears?&rdquo; a voice said in English behind him. &ldquo;Aren't they
+      sweet?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had jumped so as to face about, and somebody laughed at him. Yasmini
+      stood not two arms' lengths away, lovelier than the dead woman because of
+      the merry life in her, young and warm, aglow, but looking like the dead
+      woman and the woman of the frieze--the woman of the lamp--bowls--the
+      statue--come to life, speaking to him in English more sweetly than if
+      it had been her mother tongue. The English abuse their language. Yasmini
+      caressed it and made it do its work twice over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Being dressed as a native, he salaamed low. Knowing him for what he was,
+      she gave him the senna-stained tips of her warm fingers to kiss, and he
+      thought she trembled when he touched them. But a second later she had
+      snatched them away and was treating him to raillery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Man of pills and blisters!&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;tell me how those bodies are
+      preserved! Spill knowledge from that learned skull of thine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not answer. He never shone in conversation at any time, having made
+      as many friends as enemies by saying nothing until the spirit moves him.
+      But she did not know that yet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I knew for certain why those two did not turn to worms,&rdquo; she went on,
+      &ldquo;almost I would choose to die now, while I am beautiful! Think of the fogy
+      museum men!&rdquo; (She called them by a far less edifying name, really, for the
+      East is frank in that way, especially in its use of other tongues.) &ldquo;What
+      would they say, think you, King sahib, if they found us two dead beside
+      those two? Would not that be a mystery? Don't you love mysteries? Speak,
+      man, speak! Has Khinjan struck you dumb?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he did not speak. He was staring at her arm, where two whitish marks
+      on the skin betrayed that bracelets had been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, those! They are theirs. I would not rob the dead, or the gods would
+      turn on me. I robbed you, instead, while you slept. Fie, King sahib, while
+      you slept!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But her steel did not strike on flint. It was her eyes that flashed. He
+      would have done better to have seemed ashamed, for then he might have
+      fooled her, at least for a while. But having judged himself, he did not
+      care a fig for her judgment of him. She realized that instantly and having
+      found a tool that would not work, discarded it for a better one. She grew
+      confidential.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I borrow them,&rdquo; she explained, &ldquo;but I put them back. I take them for so
+      many days, and when the day comes--the gods like us to be exact! Once
+      there was an Englishman to whom I lent the larger one, and he refused to
+      return it. He wanted it to wear, to bring him luck. Collins, of the
+      Gurkhas. A cobra bit him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King's eyes changed, for Collins of the Gurkhas had died in his two arms,
+      saying never a word. He had always wondered why the native who ran in to
+      kill the cobra had run away again and left Collins lying there after
+      seeming to shake hands with him. Yasmini, watching his eyes and reading
+      his memory, missed nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You saw?&rdquo; she said excitedly. &ldquo;You remember? Then you understand! You
+      yourself were near death when I took the bracelet last night. The time was
+      up. I would have stabbed you if you had tried to prevent me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now he spoke at last and gave her a first glimpse of an angle of his mind
+      she had not suspected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Princess,&rdquo; he said. He used the word with the deference some men can
+      combine with effrontery, so that very tenderness has barbs. &ldquo;You might
+      have had that thing back if you had sent a messenger for it at any time. A
+      word by a servant would have been enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could never have reached Khinjan then!&rdquo; she retorted. Her eyes
+      flashed again, but his did not waver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Princess,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;why speak of what you don't know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought she would strike like a snake, but she smiled at him instead.
+      And when Yasmini has smiled on a man he has never been just the same man
+      afterward. He knows more, for one thing. He has had a lesson in one of the
+      finer arts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will speak of what I do know,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;No, there is no need. Look!
+      Look!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She pointed at the bed--at the man on the bed--fingers locked in
+      those of a woman who looked so like herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see--yet you do not see! Men are blind! Men look into a mirror,
+      and see only whiskers they forgot to shave the day before. Women look once
+      and then remember! Look again!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked, knowing well there was something to be understood, that stared
+      him in the face. But for the life of him he could not determine question
+      or answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is in your bosom?&rdquo; she asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his hand to his shirt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Draw it out!&rdquo; she said, as a teacher drills a child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew out the gold-hilted knife with the bronze blade, with which a man
+      had meant to murder him. He let it lie on the palm of his hand and looked
+      from it to her and back again. The hilt might have been a portrait of her
+      modeled from the life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is another like it,&rdquo; she said, stepping to the bedside. She drew
+      back the woman's dress at the bosom and showed a knife exactly like that
+      in King's hand. &ldquo;One lay on her bosom and one on his when I found them!&rdquo;
+       she said. &ldquo;Now, think again!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did think, of thirty thousand possibilities, and of one impossible idea
+      that stood up prominent among them all and insisted on seeming the only
+      likely one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw the knife in your bosom last night,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and laughed so that
+      I nearly wakened you. Man! Are you stupid? Will that ready wit of yours
+      not work? Have I bewildered you? Is it my perfume? My eyes? My jewels?
+      What is it? Think, man! Think!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But if she wanted to make him guess aloud for her amusement she was
+      wasting time. Had he known the answer he would have held his tongue. As he
+      did not know it, he had all the more reason to wait indefinitely, if need
+      be. But interminable waiting was no part of her plan. Words were welling
+      out of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I gave a fool that knife to use, because he was afraid. It gave him
+      courage. When he failed I knew it by telegram, and I sent another fool
+      before the wires were cold, to kill him in the police-station cell for
+      having failed. One fool has been stabbed and the English will hang the
+      other. Then I sent twenty men to turn India inside out and find the knife
+      again, for like the bracelets it has its place. And that is why I laughed.
+      They are hunting. They will hunt until I call them off!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why didn't you take it with the bracelet?&rdquo; King asked her, holding it
+      out. &ldquo;Take it now. I don't want it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She accepted it and laid it on the man's bronze armor. Then, however, she
+      resumed it and played with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look again!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Think and look again!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked, and he knew now. But he still preferred that she should tell
+      him, and his lips shut tight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, having ordered your death, did I countermand the order when your
+      life had been attempted once? Why, as soon as Rewa Gunga had seen you, did
+      I order you to be aided in every way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Still he did not answer, although the solution to that riddle, too, was
+      beginning to dawn on his consciousness. He suspected she would be annoyed
+      if he deprived her of the fun of telling him, so that by being silent he
+      played both her game and his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did I order your death in the first place?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The answer to that was obvious, but she answered it for him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because, since the sirkar insisted that one man must come with me to
+      Khinjan, I preferred a fool, who could be lost on the way. I knew your
+      reputation. I never heard any man call you a fool.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed. He nodded. She was obviously telling truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can you guess why I changed my mind about you--wise man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked from him to the man on the bed and back to him again. Having
+      solved her riddle, King had leisure to be interested in her eyes, and
+      watched them analytically, like a jeweler appraising diamonds. They were
+      strangely reminiscent, but much more changeable and colorful than any he
+      had ever seen. They had the baffling trick of changing while he watched
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Having sent a man to kill you, why did I cease to want you killed?
+      Instead of losing you on the way to Khinjan, why did I run risks to
+      protect you after you reached here? Why did I save your life in the Cavern
+      of Earth's Drink to-night? You do not know yet? Then I will tell you
+      something else you do not know. I was in Delhi when you were! I watched
+      and listened while you and Rewa Gunga talked in my house! I was in Rewa
+      Gunga's carriage on the train that he took and you did not! I have learned
+      at first hand that you are not a fool. But that was not enough! You had to
+      be three things--clever and brave and one other. The one other you
+      are! Brave you have proved yourself to be! Clever you must be, to trick
+      your way into Khinjan Caves, even with Ismail at your elbow! That is why I
+      saved your life--because you are those two things and--and--one
+      other!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She snatched a mirror from a little ivory table--a modern mirror--bad
+      glass, bad art, bad workmanship, but silver warranted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look in it and then at him!&rdquo; she ordered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he did not need to look. The man on the bed was not so much like
+      himself as the woman was like her, but the resemblance seemed to grow
+      under his eyes, as such things do. It was helped out by the stain his
+      brother had applied to his face in the Khyber. King was the taller and the
+      younger by several years, but the noses were the same, and the wrinkled
+      fore-heads; both men had the same firm mouth; both looked like Romans.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did you get that scar?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She came closer and took his hand, holding it in both hers, and he felt
+      the same thrill Samson knew. He steeled himself as Samson did not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A Mahsudi got me with a martini at long range in the blockade of 1902,&rdquo;
+       he said dryly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look! Did he get his from a spear or from an arrow?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Almost in the same spot, also on the dead man's left hand, was a scar so
+      nearly like it that it needed a third and a fourth glance to tell the
+      difference. They both bent over the bed to see it, and she laid a hand on
+      his shoulder. Touch and scent and confidence, all three were bewitching;
+      all three were calculated, too! He could have killed her, and she knew he
+      could have killed her, just as she knew he would not. Yet what right had
+      she to know it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Athelstan!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She pronounced his given name as if she loved the word, standing straight
+      again and looking into his eyes. There were high lights in hers that
+      outgleamed the diamonds on her dress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your gods and mine have done this, Athelstan. When the gods combine they
+      lay plans well indeed!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I only know one God,&rdquo; he answered simply, as a man speaks of the deep
+      things in his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know of many! They love me! They shall love you, too! Many are better
+      than one! You shall learn to know my gods, for we are to be partners, you
+      and I!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed at him, looking like a goddess herself, but he frowned. And
+      the more he frowned the better she seemed to like him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Partners in what, Princess?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou--Ismail dubbed thee Ready o' wit!--answer thine own
+      question!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She took his hand again, her eyes burning with excitement and mysticism
+      and ambition like a fever. She seemed to take more than physical
+      possession of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What brought them here? Tell me that!&rdquo; she demanded, pointing to the bed.
+      &ldquo;You think he brought, her? I tell you she was the spur that drove him! Is
+      it a wonder that men called her the 'Heart of the Hills'? I found them ten
+      years ago and clothed her and put new linen on their bed, for the old was
+      all rags and dust. There have always been hundreds--and sometimes
+      thousands--who knew the secret of Khinjan Caves, but this has been a
+      secret within a secret. Some one, who knew the secret before I, sawed
+      those bracelets through and fitted hinges and clasps. The men you saw in
+      the Cavern of Earth's Drink have no doubt I am the 'Heart of the Hills'
+      come to life! They shall know thee as Him within a little while!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She held his hand a little tighter and pressed closer to him, laughing
+      softly. He stood as if made of iron, and that only made her laugh the
+      more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tales of the 'Heart of the Hills' have puzzled the Raj, haven't they,
+      these many years? They sent me to find the source of them. Me! They chose
+      well! There are not many like me! I have found this one dead woman who was
+      like me. And in ten years, until you came, I have found no man like Him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She tried to look into his eyes, but he frowned straight in front of him.
+      His native costume and Rangar turban did not make him seem any less a man.
+      His jowl, that was beginning to need shaving, was as grim and as
+      satisfying as the dead Roman's. She stroked his left hand with soft
+      fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I used to think I knew how to dance!&rdquo; she laughed--&ldquo;For ten years I
+      have taken those pictures of her for my model and have striven to learn
+      what she knew. I have surpassed her! I used to think I knew how to amuse
+      myself with men's dreams--until I found this! Then I dreamed on my
+      own account! My dream was true, my warrior! You have come! Our hour has
+      come!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She tugged at his hand. He was hers, soul and harness, if outward signs
+      could prove it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Is this my hospitality? You are weary and hungry.
+      Come!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She led him by the hand, for it would have needed brute force to pry her
+      fingers loose. She drew aside the leather curtain that hung on a bronze
+      rod near the bed, led him through it, and let it clash to again behind
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now they were in the dark together, and it was not comprehended in her
+      scheme of things to let circumstance lie fallow. She pressed his hand, and
+      sighed, and then hurried, whispering tender words he could scarcely catch.
+      When they burst together through a curtain at the other end of a passage
+      in the rock, his skin was red under the tan and for the first time her
+      eyes refused to meet his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did they choose that cave to sleep in?&rdquo; she asked him. &ldquo;Is not this a
+      better one? Who laid them there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared about. They were in a great room far more splendid than the
+      first. There was a fountain in the center splashing in the midst of
+      flowers. They were cut flowers. The &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; must have been scoured for
+      them within a day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were great cushioned couches all about and two thrones made of ivory
+      and gold. Between two couches was a table, laden with golden plates and a
+      golden jug, on pure white linen. There were two goblets of beaten gold and
+      knives with golden handles and bronze blades. The whole room seemed to be
+      drenched in the scent Yasmini favored, and there was the same frieze
+      running round all four walls, with the woman depicted on it dancing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, we shall eat!&rdquo; she said, leading him by the hand to a couch. She
+      took the one facing him, and they lay like two Romans of the Empire with
+      the table in between.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She struck a golden gong then, and a native woman came in who stared at
+      King as if she had seen him before and did not like him. Except for the
+      jewels, she was dressed exactly like Yasmini, which is to say that her
+      gauzy stuff was all but transparent. But Yasmini uses raiment as she does
+      her eyes; it is part of her, and of her art. The maid, who would have
+      shone among many women, looked stiff and dull by contrast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I trust no Hill woman--they are cattle with human tongues,&rdquo; Yasmini
+      said, frowning at the maid. &ldquo;Even in Delhi there was only this one woman
+      whom I dared bring here with me. You brought my men-servants! They are
+      loyal, but as clumsy as the bears in their cold 'Hills'! Rewa Gunga
+      brought me this one disguised as a man--you remember?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She nodded to the servant, who clapped her hands. At once came a stream of
+      Hillmen, robed in white, who carried sherbet in bottles cooled in snow and
+      dishes fragrant with hot food. He recognized his own prisoners from the
+      Mir Khan Palace jail, and nodded to them as they set the things down under
+      the maid's direction. When they had done the woman chased them out and
+      came and stood behind Yasmini with a fan, for though it was not too hot,
+      she liked to have her golden hair blown into movement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My cook was a viceroy's,&rdquo; she said, beginning to eat. &ldquo;He killed an
+      officer who said the curry had pig's fat in it. That made him free of
+      Khinjan but of not many other places! I have promised him a swim in
+      Earth's Drink when he ever forgets his art!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King ate, because a man can not talk and eat at once. It was true that he
+      was hungry, that hunger is a piquant sauce, and that artist was an
+      adjective too mild to apply to the cook. But the other reason was his
+      chief one. Yasmini ate daintily, as if only to keep him company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You would rather have wine?&rdquo; she asked suddenly. &ldquo;All sahibs drink wine.
+      Bring wine!&rdquo; she ordered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But King shook his head, and she looked pleased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had thought she would be disappointed. When he had finished eating she
+      drove the maid away with a sharp word; and when King jumped to his feet
+      she led him toward the gold-and-ivory thrones, taking her seat on one of
+      them and bidding him adjust the footstool.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would I might offer you the other!&rdquo; she said, merrily enough, &ldquo;but you
+      must sit at my feet until our hearts are one!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was clear that she took no delight in easy victories, for she laughed
+      aloud at the quizzical expression on his face. He guessed that if she
+      could have conquered him at the first attempt a day would have found her
+      weary of him; there was deliberate wisdom in his plan for the present to
+      seem to let her win by little inches at a time. He reasoned that so she
+      would tell him more than if he defied her outright.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He brought an ivory footstool and set it about a yard away from her waxen
+      toes. And she, watching him with burning eyes, wound tresses of her hair
+      around the golden dagger handle, making her jewels glitter with each
+      movement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You pleased me by refusing wine,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You please me--oh, you
+      please me! Christians drink wine and eat beef and pig-meat. Ugh! Hindu and
+      Muslim both despise them, having each a little understanding of his own.
+      The gods of India, who are the only real gods, what do they think of it
+      all! They have been good to the English, but they have had no thanks. They
+      will stand aside now and watch a greater jihad than the world has ever
+      seen! And the Hindu, who holds the cow sacred, will not support Christians
+      who hold nothing sacred, against Muhammadans who loathe the pig!
+      Christianity has failed! The English must go down with it--just as
+      Rome went down when she dabbled in Christianity. Oh, I know all about
+      Rome!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the gods of India?&rdquo; he asked, to keep her to the point now that she
+      seemed well started.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was there to learn, not to teach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know them, too! I know them as nobody else does! They are neither
+      Hindu, nor Muhammadan, but are older by a thousand ages than either
+      foolishness! I love them, and they love me--as you shall love me,
+      too! If they did not love both of us, we would not both be here! We must
+      obey them!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      None of the East's amazing ways of courtship are ever tedious. Love
+      springs into being on an instant and lives a thousand years inside an
+      hour. She left no doubt as to her meaning. She and King were to love, as
+      the East knows love, and then the world might have just what they two did
+      not care to take from it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His only possible course as yet was the defensive, and there is no defense
+      like silence. He was still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sirkar,&rdquo; she went on, &ldquo;the silly sirkar fears that perhaps Turkey may
+      enter the war. Perhaps a jihad may be proclaimed. So much for fear! I
+      know! I have known for a very long time! And I have not let fear trouble
+      me at all!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes were on his steadily, and she read no fear in his, either, for
+      none was there. In hers he saw ambition--triumph already--excitement--the
+      gambler's love of all the hugest risks. Behind them burned genius and the
+      devilry that would stop at nothing. As the general had told him in
+      Peshawur, she would dare open Hell's gate and ride the devil down the
+      Khyber for the fun of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Au diable, diable et demie!&rdquo; the French say; and like most French
+      proverbs it is a wise one. But whence the devil and a half should come to
+      thwart her was not obvious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must be a devil and a half,&rdquo; he told himself, and very nearly laughed
+      aloud at the idea. She mistook the sudden humor in his eyes for admiration
+      of herself, being used to that from men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Listen, while I tell you all from the beginning! The sirkar sent me to
+      discover what may be this 'Heart of the Hills' men talk about. I found
+      these caves--and this! I told the sirkar a little about the Caves,
+      and nothing at all about the Sleepers. But even at that they only believed
+      the third of what I said. And I--back in Delhi I bought books--borrowed
+      books--sent to Europe for more books--and hired babu Sita Ram to
+      read them to me, until his tongue grew dry and swollen and he used to fall
+      asleep in a corner. I know all about Rome! Days I spent--weeks!--months!--listening
+      to the history of their great Caesar, and their little Caesars--of
+      their conquests and their games! It was good, and I understood it all!
+      Rome should have been true to the old gods, and they would have been true
+      to her! She fell when she fooled with Christianity!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was speaking dreamily now, with her chin resting on a hand and an
+      elbow on the ivory arm of the throne, remembering as she told her story.
+      And it meant so much to her, she was so in earnest, that her voice
+      conjured up pictures for King to see.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I had read enough I came back here to think. I knew enough now to be
+      sure that the Sleeper is a Roman, and the 'Heart of the Hills' a Grecian
+      maid. She is like me. That is why I know she drove him to make an empire,
+      choosing for a beginning these 'Hills' where Rome had never penetrated. He
+      found her in Greece. He plunged through Persia to build a throne for her!
+      I have seen it all in dreams, and again in the crystal! And because I was
+      all alone, I saw that I would need all the skill I could learn, and much
+      patience. So I began to learn to dance as she danced, using those pictures
+      of her as a model. I have surpassed her! I can dance better than she ever
+      did!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Between times I would go to Delhi and dance there a little, and a little
+      in other places--once indeed before a viceroy, and once for the king
+      of England--and all men--the king, too!--told me that none
+      in the world can dance as I can! And all the while I kept looking for the
+      man--the man who should be like the Sleeper, even as I am like her
+      whom he loved!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Many a man--many and many a man I have tried and found wanting! For
+      I was impatient in spite of resolutions. I burned to find him at once, and
+      begin! But you are the first of all the men I have tested who answered all
+      the tests! Languages--he must speak the native tongues. Brave be must
+      be--and clever--resembling the Sleeper in appearance. I began to
+      think long ago that I must forego that last test, for there was none like
+      the Sleeper until you came. And when this world war broke--for it is
+      a world war, a world war I tell you!--I thought at last that I must
+      manage all alone. And then you came!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there were many I tried--many--especially after I abandoned
+      the thought that the man must resemble the Sleeper. There was a Prince of
+      Germany who came to India on a hunting trip. You remember?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King pricked his ears and allowed himself to grin, for in common with many
+      hundred other men who had been lieutenants at the time, he would once have
+      given an ear and an eye to know the truth of that affair. The grin
+      transformed his whole appearance, until Yasmini beamed on him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm listening, Princess!&rdquo; he reminded her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well--he came--the Prince of Germany--the borrower!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Borrower of what, Princess?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of wit! Of brains! Of platitudes! Of reputation! There came a crowd with
+      him of such clumsy plunderers, asking such rude questions, that even the
+      sirkar could not shut its ears and eyes!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not know all about sahibs in those days. I thought that, although
+      this man is what he is, yet he is a prince, and perhaps I can fire him
+      with my genius. I could have taught him the native tongues. I thought he
+      had ambition, but I learned that he is only greedy. You see, I was
+      foolish, not knowing yet that in good time if I am patient my man will
+      come to me! But I learned all about Germans--all!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I offered him India first, then Asia, then the world--even as I now
+      offer them to you. The sirkar sent him to see me dance, and he stayed to
+      hear me talk. When I saw at last that he has the head and heart of a hyena
+      I told him lies. But he, being drunk, told me truths that I have
+      remembered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Later he sent two of his officers to ask me questions, and they were
+      little better than he, although a little better mannered. I told them
+      lies, too, and they told me lies, but they told me much that was true.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then the prince came again, a last time. And I was weary of him. The
+      sirkar was very weary of him too. He offered me money to go to Germany and
+      dance for the kaiser in Berlin. He said I will be shown there much that
+      will be to my advantage. I refused. He made me other offers. So I spat in
+      his face and threw food at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He complained to the sirkar against me, sending one of his high officers
+      to demand that I be whipped. So I told the sirkar some--not much,
+      indeed, but enough--of the things he and his officers had told me.
+      And the sirkar said at once that there was both cholera and bubonic
+      plague, and he must go home!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have heard--three men told me--that he said he will never
+      rest until I have been whipped! But I have heard that his officers laughed
+      behind his back. And ever since that time there have always been Germans
+      in communication with me. I have had more money from Berlin than would
+      bribe the viceroy's council, and I have not once been in the dark about
+      Germany's plans--although they have always thought I am in the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I went on looking for my man--studying all, Germans, English, Turks,
+      French--and there was a Frenchman whom I nearly chose--and an
+      American, a man who used the strangest words, who laughed at me. I studied
+      Hindu, Muslim, Christian, every good-looking fighting man who came my way,
+      knowing well that all creeds are one when the gods have named their
+      choice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There came that old Bull-with-a-beard, Muhammad Anim, and for a time I
+      thought he is the man, for he is a man whatever else he is. But I tired of
+      him. I called him Bull-with-a-beard, and the 'Hills' took it up and mocked
+      him, until the new name stuck. He still thinks he is the man, having more
+      strength to hope and more will to will wrongly than any man I ever met,
+      except a German. I have even been sure sometimes that Muhammad Anim is a
+      German; yet now I am not sure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From all the men I met and watched I have learned all they knew! And I
+      have never neglected to tell the sirkar sufficient of what men have told
+      me, to keep the sirkar pleased with me!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor have I ever played Germany's game--no, no! I have talked with a
+      prince of Germany, and I understand too well! Who sups with a boar may get
+      good roots to eat, but must endure pigs' feet in the trough! Pigs' hides
+      make good saddles; I have used the Germans, as they think they have used
+      me! I have used them ruthlessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Knowing all I knew, and being ready except that I had not found my man
+      yet, I dallied in India on the eve of war, watching a certain Sikh to
+      discover whether he is the man or not. But he lacked imagination, and I
+      was caught in Delhi when war broke and the English closed the Khyber Pass.
+      Yet I had to come up the Khyber, to reach Khinjan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So it was fortunate that I knew of a German plot that I could spoil at
+      the last minute. I fooled the Germans by letting the Sikh whom I had
+      watched discover it. The Germans still believe me their accomplice--and
+      the sirkar was so pleased that I think if I had asked for an English
+      peerage they would have answered me soberly. A million dynamite bombs was
+      a big haul for the sirkar! My offer to go to Khinjan and keep the 'Hills'
+      quiet was accepted that same day!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what are a million dynamite bombs! Dynamite bombs have been coming
+      into Khinjan month by month these three years! Bombs and rifles and
+      cartridges! Muhammad Anim's men, whom he trusts because he must, hid it
+      all in a cave I showed them, that they think, and he thinks, has only one
+      entrance to it. Muhammad Anim sealed it, and he has the key. But I have
+      the ammunition!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was another way out of that cave, although there is none now, for I
+      have blocked it. My men, whom I trust because I know them, carried
+      everything out by the back way, and I have it all. I will show it to you
+      presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know all Muhammad Anim's plans. Bull-with-a-beard believes himself a
+      statesman, yet he told me all he knows! He has told me how Germany plans
+      to draw Turkey in and to force Turkey to proclaim a jihad. As if I did not
+      know it first, almost before the Germans knew it! Fools! The jihad will
+      recoil on them! It will be like a cobra, striking whoever stirs it! A
+      typhoon, smiting right and left! Christianity is doomed, and the Germans
+      call themselves Christians! Fools! Rome called herself Christian--and
+      where is Rome?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But we, my warrior, when Muhammad Anim gets the word from Germany and
+      gives the sign, and the 'Hills' are afire, and the whole East roars in the
+      flame of the jihad--we will put ourselves at the head of that jihad,
+      and the East and the world is ours!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King smiled at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The East isn't very well armed,&rdquo; he objected. &ldquo;Mere numbers--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Numbers?&rdquo; She laughed at him. &ldquo;The West has the West by the throat! It is
+      tearing itself! They will drag in America! There will be no armed nation
+      with its hands free--and while those wolves fight, other wolves shall
+      come and steal the meat! The old gods, who built these caverns in the
+      'Hills,' are laughing! They are getting ready! Thou and I--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As she coupled him and herself together in one plan she read the changed
+      expression of his face--the very quickly passing cloud that even the
+      best-trained man can not control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know!&rdquo; she asserted, sitting upright and coming out of her dream to
+      face facts as their master. She looked more lovely now than ever, although
+      twice as dangerous. &ldquo;You are thinking of your brother--of his head!
+      That I am a murderess who can never be your friend! Is that not so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not answer, but his eyes may have betrayed something, for she
+      looked as if he had struck her. Leaning forward, she held the gold-hilted
+      dagger out to him, hilt first.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take it and stab me!&rdquo; she ordered. &ldquo;Stab--if you blame me for your
+      brother's death! I should have known him for your brother if I had come on
+      him in the dark!--His head might have come from your shoulders!--You
+      were like a man holding up his own head, as I have seen in pictures in a
+      book! I would never have killed him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her golden hair fell all about his shoulders, and its scent was not
+      intended to be sobering. She ran warm fingers through his hair while she
+      held the knife toward him with the other hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take it and stab!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo; she laughed. &ldquo;No! You are my warrior--my man--my well--beloved!
+      You have come to me alone out of all the world! You would no more stab me
+      than the gods would forget me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Their eyes were on each other's--deep looking into deep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Strength!&rdquo; she said, flinging him away and leaning back to look at him,
+      almost as a fed cat stretches in the sunlight. &ldquo;Courage! Simplicity!
+      Directness! Strength I have, too, and courage never failed me, but my mind
+      is a river winding in and out, gathering as it goes. I have no directness--no
+      simplicity! You go straight from point to point, my sending from the gods!
+      I have needed you! Oh, I have needed you so much, these many years! And
+      now that you have come you want to hate me because you think I killed your
+      brother! Listen--I will tell you all I know about your brother.&rdquo;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without a scrap of proof of any kind he knew she was telling truth
+      unadorned--or at least the truth as she saw it. Eye to eye, there are
+      times when no proof is needed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Without my leave, Muhammad Anim sent five hundred men on a foray toward
+      the Khyber. Bull-with-a-beard needed an Englishman's head, for proof for a
+      spy of his who could not enter Khinjan Caves. They trapped your brother
+      outside Ali Masjid with fifty of his men. They took his head after a long
+      fight, leaving more than a hundred of their own in payment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bull-with-a-beard was pleased. But he was careless, and I sent my men to
+      steal the head from his men. I needed evidence for you. And I swear to you--I
+      swear to you by my gods who have brought us two together--that I
+      first knew it was your brother's head when you held it up in the Cavern of
+      Earth's Drink! Then I knew it could not be anybody else's head!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why bid me throw it to them, then?&rdquo; he asked her, and he was aware of her
+      scorn before the words had left his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She leaned back again and looked at him through lowered eyes, as if she
+      must study him all anew. She seemed to find it hard to believe that he
+      really thought so in the commonplace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is a head to me, or to you--a head with no life in it--carrion!--compared
+      to what shall be? Would you have known it was his head if you had thrown
+      it to them when I ordered you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He understood. Some of her blood was Russian, some Indian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A friend is a friend, but a brother is a rival,&rdquo; says the East, out of
+      world-old experience, and in some ways Russia is more eastern than the
+      East itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Muhammad Anim shall answer to you for your brother's head!&rdquo; she said with
+      a little nod, as if she were making concessions to a child. &ldquo;At present we
+      need him. Let him preach his jihad, and loose it at the right time. After
+      that he will be in the way! You shall name his death--Earth's Drink--slow
+      torture--fire! Will that content you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said, with a dry laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What more can you ask?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Less! My brother died at the head of his men. He couldn't ask more. Let
+      Bull-with-a-beard alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She set both elbows on her knees and laid her chin on both hands to stare
+      at him again. He began to remember long-forgotten schoolboy lore about
+      chemical reagents, that dissolve materials into their component parts,
+      such was the magic of her eyes. There were no eyes like hers that he had
+      ever seen, although Rewa Gunga's had been something like them. Only Rewa
+      Gunga's had not changed so. Thought of the Rangar no sooner crossed his
+      mind than she was speaking of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rewa Gunga met you in the dark, beyond those outer curtains, did he not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did he tell you that if you pass the curtains you shall be told all I
+      know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded again, and she laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would take time to tell you all I know! First, I think I will show you
+      things. Afterward you shall ask me questions, and I will answer them!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood up, and of course he stood up, too. So, she on the footstool of
+      the throne, her eyes and his were on a level. She laid hands on his
+      shoulders and looked into his eyes until he could see his own twin
+      portraits in hers that were glowing sunset pools. Heart of the Hills? The
+      Heart of all the East seemed to burn in her, rebellious!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you believing me?&rdquo; she asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded, for no man could have helped believing her. As she knew the
+      truth, she was telling it to him, as surely as she was doing her skillful
+      best to mesmerize him. But the Secret Service is made up of men trained
+      against that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; she said, and stepping down she took his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She led him past the thrones to other leather curtains in a wall, and
+      through them into long hewn passages from cavern into cavern, until even
+      the Rock of Gibraltar seemed like a doll's house in comparison.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one cave there were piles of javelins that had been stacked there by
+      the Sleeper and his men. In another were sheaves of arrows; and in one
+      were spears in racks against a wall. There were empty stables, with rings
+      made fast into the rock where a hundred horses could have stood in line.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She showed him a cave containing great forges, where the bronze had been
+      worked, with charcoal still piled up against the wall at one end. There
+      were copper and tin ingots in there of a shape he had never seen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know where they came from,&rdquo; she told him. &ldquo;I have made it my business
+      to know all the 'Hills.' I know things the Hillmen's
+      great-great-great-grand-fathers forgot! I know old workings that would
+      make a modern nation rich! We shall have money when we need it, never
+      fear! We shall conquer India while the English backs are turned and the
+      best troops are oversea. We will bring a hundred thousand slaves back here
+      to work our mines! With what they dig from the mines, copper and gold and
+      tin, we will make ready to buy the English off when they are free to turn
+      this way again. The English will do anything for money! They will be in
+      debt when this war is over, and their price will be less then than now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed merrily at him because his face showed that he did not
+      appreciate that stricture. Then she called him her Warrior and her
+      Well-beloved and took him down a long passage, holding his hand all the
+      way, to show him slots cut in the floor for the use of archers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You entered Khinjan Caves by a tunnel under this floor, Well-beloved.
+      There is no other entrance!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time Well-beloved was her name for him, although there was no air
+      of finality about it. It was as if she paved the way for use of Athelstan
+      and that was a sacred name. It was amazing how she conveyed that
+      impression without using words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Sleeper cut these slots for his archers. Then he had another thought
+      and set these cauldrons in place, to boil oil to pour down. Could any army
+      force a way through by the route by which you entered?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said, marveling at the ton-weight copper cauldrons, one to each
+      hole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even without rifles for the defense?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I have more than a thousand Mauser rifles here, and more than a
+      million rounds of ammunition!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did you get them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall tell you that later. Come and see some other things. See and
+      believe!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She showed him a cave in which boxes were stacked in high square piles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dynamite bombs!&rdquo; she boasted. &ldquo;How many boxes? I forget! Too many to
+      count! Women brought them all the way from the sea, for even Muhammad Anim
+      could not make Afridi riflemen carry loads. I have wondered what
+      Bull-with-a-beard will say when he misses his precious dynamite!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've enough in there to blow the mountain up!&rdquo; King advised her. &ldquo;If
+      somebody fired a pistol in here, the least would be the collapse of this
+      floor into the tunnel below with a hundred thousand tons of rock on top of
+      it. There is no other way out?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Earth's Drink!&rdquo; she said, and he made a grimace that set her to laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But she looked at him darkly after that and he got the impression that the
+      thought was not new to her, and that she did not thank him for the advice.
+      He began to wonder whether there was anything she had not thought of--any
+      loophole she had left him for escape--any issue she had not foreseen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kill her!&rdquo; a secret voice urged him. But that was the voice of the
+      &ldquo;Hills,&rdquo; that are violent first and regretful afterward. He did not listen
+      to it. And then the wisdom of the West came to him, as epitomized by
+      Cocker along the lines laid down by Solomon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't possible to make a puzzle that has no solution to it. The fact
+      that it's a puzzle is the proof that there's a key! Go ahead!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the &ldquo;Go ahead!&rdquo; that Solomon omitted, and that makes Cocker such
+      cheerful reading. King ceased conjecturing and gave full attention to his
+      guide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She showed him where eleven hundred Mauser rifles stood in racks in
+      another cave, with boxes of ammunition piled beside them--each rifle
+      and cartridge worth its weight in silver coin--a very rajah's ransom!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Germans are generous in some things--only in some things--very
+      mean in others!&rdquo; she told him. &ldquo;They sent no medical stores, and no
+      blankets!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Past caves where provisions of every imaginable kind were stored,
+      sufficient for an army, she led him to where her guards slept together
+      with the thirty special men whom King had brought with him up the Khyber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have five hundred others whom I dare trust to come in here,&rdquo; she said,
+      &ldquo;but they shall stay outside until I want them. A mystery is a good thing!
+      It is good for them all to wonder what I keep in here! It is good to keep
+      this sanctuary; it makes for power!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pressing very close to him, she guided him down another dark tunnel until
+      he and she stood together in the jaws of the round hole above the river,
+      looking down into the cavern of Earth's Drink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nobody looked up at them. The thousands were too busy working up a frenzy
+      for the great jihad that was to come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stacks of wood had been piled up, six-man high in the middle, and then
+      fired. The heat came upward like a furnace blast, and the smoke was a
+      great red cloud among the stalactites. Round and round that holocaust the
+      thousands did their sword-dance, yelling as the devils yelled at Khinjan's
+      birth. They needed no wine to craze them. They were drunk with fanaticism,
+      frenzy, lust!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The women brought that wood from fifty miles away!&rdquo; Yasmini shouted in
+      his ear; for the din, mingling with the river's voice, made a volcano
+      chord. &ldquo;It is a week's supply of wood! But so they are--so they will
+      be! They will lay waste India! They will butcher and plunder and burn! It
+      will be what they leave of India that we shall build anew and govern, for
+      India herself will rise to help them lay her own cities waste! It is
+      always so! Conquests always are so! Come!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She tugged at him and led him back along the tunnel and through other
+      tunnels to the throne room, where she made him sit at her feet again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The food had been cleared away in their absence. Instead, on the ebony
+      table there were pens and ink and paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She leaned back on her throne, with bare feet pressed tight against the
+      footstool, staring, staring at the table and the pens, and then at King,
+      as if she would compose an ultimatum to the world and send King to deliver
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I said I will tell you,&rdquo; she sad slowly. &ldquo;Listen!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter XIV
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Nothing new! Nothing new!
+     Nowhere to hide when a reckoning's due,
+     But right earns right, and wrong gets rue,
+     With nothing deducted or given in lieu;
+     And neither the War God, I, nor you
+     Ever could make one lie come true!
+             Vale, Ceasar!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      As Yasmini herself had admitted, she headed from point to point after a
+      manner of her own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know where is Dar es Salaam?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;East Africa,&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How far is that from here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two or three thousand miles.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And English war-ships watch the Persian Gulf and all the seas from India
+      to Aden?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have the English any ships that dive under water?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In these waters?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think not. I'm not sure, but I think not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The grenades you have seen, and the rifles and cartridges were sent by
+      the Germans to Dar es Salaam, to suppress a rising of African natives.
+      Does it begin to grow clear to you, my friend?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled as well as nodded this time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Muhammad Anim used to wait with a hundred women at a certain place on the
+      seashore. What he found on the beach there he made the women carry on
+      their heads to Khinjan. And by the time he had hidden what he found and
+      returned from Khinjan to the beach, there were more things to find and
+      bring. So they worked, he and the Germans, for I know not how long--with
+      the English watching the seas as on land lean wolves comb the valleys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you ever hear of the big whale in the Gulf?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said King. That was natural. There are as a rule about as many
+      whales as salmon in the Persian Gulf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A German who came to me in Delhi--he who first showed me pictures of
+      an underwater ship--said that at that time the officers and crew of
+      one such ship were getting great practise. Do you suppose their practise
+      made whales take refuge in the Gulf?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How should I know, Princess?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I heard a story later, of an English cruiser on its way up the
+      Gulf, that collided with a whale. The shock of hitting it bent many steel
+      plates, and the cruiser had to put back for repair. It must have been a
+      very big whale, for there was much oil on the sea for a long time
+      afterward. So I heard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And no more dynamite came--nor rifles--nor cartridges, although
+      the Germans had promised more. And orders for Muhammad Anim that had been
+      said to come by sea came now by way of Bagdad, carried by pilgrims
+      returning from the holy places. I know that because I intercepted a letter
+      and threw its bearer into Earth's Drink to save Muhammad Anim the trouble
+      of asking questions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What were the terms of the German bargain?&rdquo; King asked her. &ldquo;What
+      stipulations did they make?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With the tribes? None! They were too wise. A jihad was decided on in
+      Germany's good time; and when that time should come ten rifles in the
+      'Hills' and a thousand cartridges would mean not only a hundred dead
+      Englishmen, but ten times that number busily engaged. Why bargain when
+      there was no need? A rifle is what it is. The 'Hills' are the 'Hills'!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me about your lamp oil, then,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You burn enough oil in
+      Khinjan Caves to light Bombay! That does not come by submarine. The sirkar
+      knows how much of everything goes up the Khyber. I have seen the printed
+      lists myself--a few hundred cans of kerosene--a few score
+      gallons of vegetable oil, and all bound for farther north. There isn't
+      enough oil pressed among the 'Hills' to keep these caves going for a day.
+      Where does it all come from?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed, as a mother laughs at a child's questions, finding delicious
+      enjoyment in instructing him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are three villages, not two days' march from Khabul, where men have
+      lived for centuries by pressing oil for Khinjan Caves,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;The
+      Sleeper fetched his oil thence. There are the bones of a camel in a cave I
+      did not show you, and beside the camel are the leather bags still in which
+      the oil was carried. Nowadays it comes in second-hand cans and drums. The
+      Sleeper left gold in here. Those who kept the Sleeper's secret paid for
+      the oil in gold. No Afghan troubled why oil was needed, so long as gold
+      paid for it, until Abdurrahman heard the story. He made a ten-year-long
+      effort to learn the secret, but he failed. When he cut off the supply of
+      oil for a time, there was a rebellion so close to Khabul gates that he
+      thought better of it. Of gold and Abdurrahman, gold was the stronger. And
+      I know where the Sleeper dug his gold!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They sat in silence for a long while after that, she looking at the table,
+      with its ink and pens and paper, and he thinking, with hands clasped round
+      one knee; for it is wiser to think than to talk, even when a woman is near
+      who can read thoughts that are not guarded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Most disillusionments come simply,&rdquo; King said at last. &ldquo;D'you know,
+      Princess, what has kept the sirkar from really believing in Khinjan
+      Caves?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head. &ldquo;The gods!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;The gods can blindfold
+      governments and whole peoples as easily as they can make us see!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was the fact that they knew what provisions and what oil and what
+      necessities of life went up the Khyber and came down it. They knew a place
+      such as this was said to be could not be. They knew it! They could prove
+      it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Yasmini nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let it be a lesson to you, Princess!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stared, and her fiery-opal eyes began to change and glow. She began to
+      twist her golden hair round the dagger hilt again. But always her feet
+      were still on the footstool of the throne, as if she knew--knew--knew
+      that she stood on firm foundations. No sirkar ever doubted less than she,
+      and the suggestions in King's little homily did not please her. She looked
+      toward the table again--then again into his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Athelstan!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It sounds like a king's name! What was the
+      Sleeper's name? I have often wondered! I found no name in all the books
+      about Rome that seemed to fit him. None of the names I mouthed could make
+      me dream as the sight of him could. But, Athelstan! That is a name like a
+      king's! It seems to fit him, too! Was there such a name, in Rome?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What does it mean?&rdquo; she asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Slow of resolution!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She clapped her hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Another sign!&rdquo; she laughed. &ldquo;The gods love me! There always is a sign
+      when I need one! Slow of resolution, art thou? I will speed thy
+      resolution, Well-beloved! You were quick to change from King, of the
+      Khyber Rifle Regiment, to Kurram Khan. Change now into my warrior--my
+      dear lord--my King again!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She rose, with arms outstretched to him. All her dancer's art, her untamed
+      poetry, her witchery, were expressed in a movement. Her eyes melted as
+      they met his. And since he stood up, too, for manner's sake, they were eye
+      to eye again--almost lip to lip. Her sweet breath was in his
+      nostrils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In another moment she was in his arms, clinging to him, kissing him. And
+      if any man has felt on his lips the kiss of all the scented glamour of the
+      East, let him tell what King's sensations were. Let Ceasar, who was kissed
+      by Cleopatra, come to life and talk of it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King's arm is strong, and he did not stand like an idol. His head might
+      swim, but she, too, tasted the delirium of human passion loosed and given
+      for a mad swift minute. If his heart swelled to bursting, so must hers
+      have done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have needed you!&rdquo; she whispered. &ldquo;I have been all alone! I have needed
+      you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then her lips sought his again, and neither spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Neither knew how long it was before she began to understand that he, not
+      she, was winning. The human answer to her appeal was full. He gave her all
+      she asked of admiration, kiss for kiss. And then--her arms did not
+      cling so tightly, although his strong right arm was like a stanchion.
+      Because he knew that he, not she, was winning, he picked her up in his
+      arms and kissed her as if she were a child. And then, because he knew he
+      had won, he set her on her feet on the footstool of the throne, and even
+      pitied her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She felt the pity. As she tossed the hair back over her shoulder her eyes
+      glowed with another meaning--dangerous--like a tiger's glare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You pity me? You think because I love you, you can feed my love on a
+      plate to the Indian government? You think my love is a weapon to use
+      against me? Your love for me may wait for a better time? You are not so
+      wise as I thought you, Athelstan!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he knew he had won. His heart was singing down inside him as it had
+      not sung since he left India behind. But he stood quite humbly before her,
+      for had he not kissed her?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think a kiss is the bond between us? You mistake! You forget! The
+      kiss, my Athelstan, was the fruit, not the seed! The seed came first! If I
+      loosed you--if I set you free--you would never dare go back to
+      India!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He scarcely heard her. He knew he had won. His heart was like a bird,
+      fluttering wildly. He knew that the next step would be shown him, and for
+      the present he had time and grace to pity her, knowing how he would have
+      felt if she had won. Besides, he had kissed her, and he had not lied. Each
+      kiss had been a tribute of admiration, for was she not splendid--amazing--more
+      to be desired than wine? He stood with bowed head, lest the triumph in his
+      eyes offend her. Yet if any one had asked him how he knew that he had won,
+      he never could have told.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you were to go back to India except as its conqueror, they would strip
+      the buttons from your uniform and tear your medals off and shoot you in
+      the back against a wall! My signature is known in India and I am known.
+      What I write will be believed. Rewa Gunga shall take a letter. He shall
+      take two--four--witnesses. He shall see them on their way and
+      shall give them the letter when they reach the Khyber and shall send them
+      into India with it. Have no fear. Bull-with-a-beard shall not intercept
+      them, as I have intercepted his men. When Rewa Gunga shall return and tell
+      me he saw my letter on its way down the Khyber, then we shall talk again
+      about pity--you and I! Come!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She took his arm, as if her threats had been caresses. Triumph shone from
+      her eyes. She tossed her brave chin and laughed at him, only encouraged to
+      greater daring by his attitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don't you kill me?&rdquo; she asked, and though his answer surprised her,
+      it did not make her angry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would do no good,&rdquo; he said simply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you kill me if you thought it would do good?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed at that as if it were the greatest joke she had ever heard. It
+      set her in the best humor possible, and by the time they reached the ebony
+      table and she had taken the pen and dipped it in the ink, she was
+      chuckling to herself as if the one good joke had grown into a hundred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She wrote in Urdu. It is likely that for all her knowledge of the spoken
+      English tongue she was not so swift or ready with the trick of writing it.
+      She had said herself that a babu read English books to her aloud. But she
+      wrote in Urdu with an easy flowing hand, and in two minutes she had thrown
+      sand on the letter and had given it to King to read. It was not like a
+      woman's letter. It did not waste a word.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;Your Captain King has been too much trouble.  He has
+        taken money from the Germans.  He adopted native dress.
+        He called himself Kurram Khan.  He slew his own brother
+        at night in the Khyber Pass.  These men will say that
+        he carried the head to Khinjan, and their word is true,
+        for I, Yasmini, saw.  He used the head for a passport,
+        to obtain admittance.  He proclaims a jihad!  He urges
+        invasion of India!  He held up his brother's head
+        before five thousand men and boasted of the murder.
+        The next you shall hear of your Captain King of the
+        Khyber Rifles, he will be leading a jihad into India.
+        You would have better trusted me.  Yasmini.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      He read it and passed it back to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They will not disbelieve me,&rdquo; she said, triumphant as the very devil over
+      a branded soul all hot. &ldquo;They will be sure you are mad, and they will
+      believe the witnesses!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He bowed. She sealed the letter and addressed it with only a scrawled mark
+      on its outer cover. That, by the way, was utter insolence, for the mark
+      would be understood at any frontier post by the officer commanding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rewa Gunga shall start with this to-day!&rdquo; she said, with more amusement
+      than malice. After that she was still for a moment, watching his eyes, at
+      a loss to understand his carelessness. He seemed strangely unabased. His
+      folded arms were not defiant, but neither were they yielding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I love you, Athelstan!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Do you love me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you are very beautiful, Princess!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beautiful? I know I am beautiful. But is that all?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Clever!&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She began to drum with the golden dagger hilt on the table, and to look
+      dangerous, which is not to infer by any means that she looked less lovely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you love me?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forgive me, Princess, but you forget. I was born east of Mecca, but my
+      folk were from the West. We are slower to love than some other nations.
+      With us love is more often growth, less often surrender at first sight. I
+      think you are wonderful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She nodded and tucked the sealed letter in her bosom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It shall go,&rdquo; she said darkly, &ldquo;and another letter with it. They looted
+      your brother's body. In his pocket they found the note you wrote him, and
+      that you asked him to destroy! That will be evidence. That will convince!
+      Come!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He followed her through leather curtains again and down the dark passage
+      into the outer chamber; and the illusion was of walking behind a
+      golden-haired Madonna to some shrine of Innocence. Her perfume was like
+      incense; her manner perfect reverence. She passed into the cave where the
+      two dead bodies lay like a high priestess performing a rite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Walking to the bed, she stood for minutes, gazing at the Sleeper and his
+      queen. And from the new angle from which King saw him the Sleeper's
+      likeness to himself was actually startling. Startling--weird--like
+      an incantation were Yasmini's words when at last she spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Muhammad lied! He lied in his teeth! His sons have multiplied his lie!
+      Siddhattha, whom men have called Gotama, the Buddha, was before Muhammad
+      and he knew more! He told of the wheel of things, and there is a wheel!
+      Yet, what knew the Buddha of the wheel? He who spoke of Dharma (the
+      customs of the law) not knowing Dharma! This is true---Of old there
+      was a wish of the gods--of the old gods. And so these two were. There
+      is a wish again now of the old gods. So, are we two not as they two were?
+      It is the same wish, and lo! We are ready, this man and I. We will obey,
+      ye gods--ye old gods!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She raised her arms and, going closer to the bed, stood there in an
+      attitude of mystic reverence, giving and receiving blessings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear gods!&rdquo; she prayed. &ldquo;Dear old gods--older than these 'Hills'--show
+      me in a vision what their fault was--why these two were ended before
+      the end!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know all the other things ye have shown me. I know the world's silly
+      creeds have made it mad, and it must rend itself, and this man and I shall
+      reap where the nations sowed--if only we obey! Wherein, ye old dear
+      gods, who love me, did these two disobey? I pray you, tell me in a
+      vision!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head and sighed. Sadness seemed to have crept over her, like
+      a cold mist from the night. It was as if she could dimly see her plans
+      foredoomed, and yet hoped on in spite of it. The fatalism that she scorned
+      as Muhammad's lie held her in its grip, and her natural courage fought
+      with it. Womanlike, she turned to King in that minute and confided to him
+      her very inmost thoughts. And he, without an inkling as to how she must
+      fail, yet knew that she must, and pitied her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you seen that breast under the armor?&rdquo; she asked suddenly. &ldquo;Come
+      nearer! Come and look! Why did his breast decay and his body stay whole
+      like hers? Did she kill him? Was that a dagger-stab in his breast? I found
+      perfume in these caves--great jars of it, and I use it always. It is
+      better than temple incense and all the breath of gardens in the spring! I
+      have put it on slaughtered animals. Where the knife has touched them, they
+      decay--as that man's breast did--but the rest of them remains
+      undecaying year after year. It was a knife, I think, that pierced his
+      breast. I think that scent is the preservative. Did she kill him? Was she
+      jealous of him? How did she die? There is no mark on her! Athelstan--listen!
+      I think he would have failed her! I think she stabbed him rather than see
+      him fail, and then swallowed poison! Afterward their servants laid them
+      there. She smiles in death because she knew the wheel will turn and that
+      death dies too! He looks grim because he knew less than she. It is always
+      woman who understands and man who fails! I think she stabbed him. She
+      should have loved him better, and then there would have been no need. I
+      will love you better than she loved him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned and devoured him with her eyes, so that it needed all his
+      manhood to hold him back from being her slave that minute. For in that
+      minute she left no charm unexercised--sex--mesmerisrn--beauty--flattery
+      (her eyes could flatter as a dumb dog's flatter a huntsman!)--grace
+      unutterable-mystery--she used every art on him she knew. Yet he stood
+      the test.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even if you fail me, Well-beloved, I will love you! The gods who gave you
+      to me will know how to make you love; and lessons are to learn. If you
+      fail me I will forgive, knowing that in the end the gods will never let
+      you fail me! You are mine, and Earth is ours, for the old gods intend it
+      so!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed to expect him to take her in his arms again; but he stood
+      respectfully and made no answer, nor any move. Grim and strong his jowl
+      was, like the Sleeper's, and the dark hair three days old on it softened
+      nothing of its lines. His Roman nose and steady, dark, full eyes suggested
+      no compromise. Yet he was good to look at. She had not lied when she said
+      she loved him, and he understood her and was sorry. But he did not look
+      sorry, nor did he offer any argument to quench her love. He was a servant
+      of the raj; his life and his love had been India's since the day he first
+      buckled on his spurs, and Yasmini wouldn't have understood that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor did she understand that, even supposing he had loved her with all his
+      heart, not on any conditions would he have admitted it until absolutely
+      free, any more than that if she crucified him he would love her the same,
+      supposing that he loved her at all. Nor did she trust the &ldquo;old gods&rdquo; too
+      well, or let them work unaided.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come with me, Athelstan!&rdquo; she said. She took his arm--found little
+      jeweled slippers in a closet hewn in the wall--put them on and led
+      him to the curtains he had entered by. She led him through them, and, red
+      as cardinals in lamplight on the other side, they stood hand-in-hand, back
+      to the leather, facing the unfathomable dark. Her fingers were so strong
+      that he could not have wrenched his own away without using the other hand
+      to help.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where are your shoes?&rdquo; she asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At the foot of these steps, Princess.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can you see them yonder in the dark?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can you guess where the darkness leads to?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shuddered and she chuckled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could you return alone by the way Ismail brought you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you try?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I must. I am not afraid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have heard the echo? Yes, I know you heard the echo. Hear it again!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She raised her head and howled like a wolf--like a lone wolf that has
+      found no quarry--melancholy, mean, grown reckless with his hunger.
+      There was a pause of nearly a minute. Then in the hideous darkness a
+      phantom wolf-pack took up the howl in chorus, and for three long minutes
+      there was din beside which the voice of living wolves at war would be a
+      slumber song. Ten times ghastlier than if it had been real, the chorus
+      wailed and ululated back and forth along immeasurable distances--became
+      one yell again--and went howling down into earth's bowels as if the
+      last of a phantom pack were left behind and yelling to be waited for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When it ceased at last King was sweating.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor am I afraid,&rdquo; she laughed, squeezing his hand yet tighter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She led him down the steps, and at the foot told him to put on his
+      slippers, as if he were a child. Then, hurrying as if those opal eyes of
+      hers were indifferent to dark or daylight, she picked her way among
+      boulders that he could feel but not see, along a floor that was only
+      smooth in places, for a distance that was long enough by two or three
+      times to lose him altogether.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he looked back there was no sign of red lights behind him. And when
+      he looked forward, there was a dim outer light in front and a whiff of the
+      cool fresh air that presages the dawn!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She led him through a gap on to a ledge of rock that hung thousands of
+      feet above the home of thunder, a ledge less than six feet wide, less than
+      twenty long, tilted back toward the cliff. There they sat, watching the
+      stars. And there they saw the dawn come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Morning looks down into Khinjan hours after the sun has risen, because the
+      precipices shut it out. But the peaks on every side are very beacons of
+      the range at the earliest peep of dawn. In silence they watched day's
+      herald touch the peaks with rosy jeweled fingers--she waiting as if
+      she expected the marvel of it all to make King speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was cold. She came and snuggled close to him, and it was so they
+      watched the sparkle of dawn's jewels die and the peaks grow gray again,
+      she with an arm on his shoulder and strands of her golden hair blown past
+      his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of what are you thinking?&rdquo; she asked him at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of India, Princess.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What of India?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She lies helpless.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! You love India?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You shall love me better! You shall love me better than your life! Then,
+      for love of me, you shall own the India you think you love! This letter
+      shall go!&rdquo; She tapped her bosom. &ldquo;It is best to cut you off from India
+      first. You shall lose that you may win!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She got up and stood in the gap, smiling mockingly, framed in the darkness
+      of the cave behind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You think you are my enemy. Love and hate never
+      lived side by side. You shall see!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then in an instant she was gone, backward into the dark. He sat and waited
+      for her, cross-legged on the ledge. As daylight began to filter downward
+      he could dimly make out the waterfall, thundering like the whelming of a
+      world; he sat staring at it, trying to formulate a plan, until it dawned
+      on him that he was nearly chilled to the bone. Then he got up and stepped
+      through the gap, too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Princess!&rdquo; he called. Then louder, &ldquo;Princess!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When the echo of his own voice died, it was as if the ghoul who made the
+      echoes had taken shape. A beard--red eye-rims--and a hook nose
+      came out of the dark, and Ismail bared yellow teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Come, little hakim!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter XV
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Private preserves?  New Notions?
+     Measure me a quart of honesty,
+     And I will trade it for a pound weight of my thoughts.
+     Then you and I shall go and dream together
+     A brand-new dream of things that never happened,
+     Nor ever can be.  Come, trade with me!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      What Yasmini had been doing in the minutes while King stared from the
+      ledge in the dawn was unguessable. Perhaps she had been praying to her old
+      gods. At least she had given Ismail strict orders, for he said nothing,
+      but seized King's hand and led him through the dark as a rat leads a blind
+      one--swiftly, surely, unhesitating. King had no means whatever of
+      guessing their direction. They did not pass the two lights again with the
+      curtain and the steps all glowing red.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They came instead to other steps, narrow and steep, that led upward in a
+      semicircle to a rough hole in a rock wall. At the top there was a little
+      yellow light, so dim and small that its rays scarcely sufficed to show the
+      opening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go up!&rdquo; said Ismail, giving King a shove and disappearing at once. One
+      side-step into blackness and he might have been a mile away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So King went up, stooping to feel each next footing with a cautious hand.
+      He was beginning to be sleepy, and to suspect that Yasmini had taken him
+      to view the dawn with just that end in view. Nothing can make tired eyes
+      so long for sleep as a glimpse of waking day--Sleepy eyes are easiest
+      to trick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not many minutes before he was sure his guess was right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The opening at the head of the stairs led into a tunnel. He followed it
+      with a hand on either wall and reached another of Khinjan's strange
+      leather curtains. His face struck the leather unexpectedly, and at that
+      instant, as if his touch were electric, the curtain sprang aside and his
+      eyes were dazzled by the light of diamonds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Aladdin's Cave, with her acting spirit of the lamp! It needed
+      effort of self-control to know that the huge, white, cut crystals that
+      sparkled all about the hewn cell could not be diamonds. They were as big
+      as his head, and bigger--at least a hundred of them, and they
+      multiplied the light of half a dozen little oil lamps until the cave
+      seemed the home of light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yasmini had not a jewel on her. She was in a new mood and new garments to
+      suit it. Her feet were still bare, but she was robed from head to heel in
+      pure white linen, on which her long hair shone as if it were truly strands
+      of gold. She received him with an air of mystic calm, gracious and
+      dignified as the high-priestess of a Grecian temple. She seemed devout--to
+      have forgotten that she ever killed a man, or made a threat or plotted for
+      a kingdom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be still,&rdquo; she said, raising a finger. &ldquo;The old gods talk to us in here.
+      It is not for us to answer them in words, but in deeds. Let us listen and
+      do!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There were two cushions--great billowy modern ones, covered in gold
+      brocade--on the floor in the midst of the cave. Between them was a
+      stand of ivory, some two feet high, whose top was a disk, cut from the
+      largest tusk that ever could have been. On the disk resting in a little
+      hollow in the ivory, was a pure, perfect crystal sphere of a foot
+      diameter. He could see his reflection in it, and Yasmini's, too, the
+      moment he entered the cave, and whichever way they moved both images
+      remained undistorted. He suspected that the lighting and the crystal
+      reflectors had not been arranged at random.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In each corner of the four-square cave there was a brazier of bronze, and
+      from each rose incense smoke, straight upward. The four streams of smoke
+      met at the ceiling and converged into a cloud that hung almost motionless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yasmini stepped very reverently to a cushion by the crystal in the middle,
+      and signed to King to imitate her. They stood facing. She seemed to pray,
+      for her eyes were hidden under the long lashes. Then she knelt, and King
+      did the same, his knees sinking deep into another cushion. So they knelt
+      eye to eye above the crystal for many minutes without either saying a
+      word. It was Yasmini who spoke first.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The old gods have showed me the past many and many a time in this,&rdquo; she
+      said. &ldquo;It is, their way of speaking to me. Now, to-day, I have prayed to
+      them to show me the future. Look! Look, Athelstan! Do as I do--so!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There seemed nothing to be gained by disobeying her. To obey her might be
+      to win new insight into the ramifications of her plans. Men who have
+      experience of the East are the last to deny that there is method in
+      Eastern magic; they glimpse the knowledge that belonged to Pharaoh's men,
+      although unlike Moses they are not always able to confound it. The East
+      forgets nothing. The West ignores. But there are men from the West who are
+      willing to look and to listen and to try to understand; like King, they go
+      high in the Service. There are others who look on at the magic with an
+      understanding eye and are caught by it. Their end is not good to
+      contemplate. The East is fettered in her own mesmeric spell and must
+      suffer until she wakes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yasmini held the upright column of the ivory stand with both hands, close
+      under the disk at the top. He copied her, placing his hands below hers.
+      Hers slipped down and covered his, soft and warm; and so they stayed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Look!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her own eyes were grown big and round, and she gazed at the crystal ball
+      as she had looked into King's eyes that night, with the very hunger of her
+      soul. Her lips were parted. Watching her, King grew expectant, too. His
+      eyes followed hers, to stare into the middle of the crystal, no longer
+      feeling sleepy, and in less than a minute he could not have withdrawn them
+      had he tried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The crystal clouded over. Yasmini's breath came steadily, with a little
+      hissing sound between her teeth, and the crystal, or else the whole world,
+      seemed to sway in time to it. Then the man in Roman armor strode out of a
+      mist, and all was steady again and easy to understand. When the man in
+      armor opened his lips to speak, one knew what he had said. When he
+      frowned, one knew why he frowned. When he smiled, one knew that she was
+      coming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she did come, dancing out of the mist behind him, to fling soft arms
+      round his neck and whisper praises in his ear. He stood like a king who
+      has come into his own, with an arm round her and his chin held high. She
+      kissed him on his proud chin, and laughed into his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were troubles--difficulties, all in the mist behind, but he
+      stood and despised them then while she caressed him!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just as spoken words had no part in the vision, yet the whole was
+      understood, so time did not enter into it. There was no connecting link
+      between each scene; each dissolved into the other, and all were one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She faded into mist, in a swirl of graceful drapery, and he frowned again.
+      A long line of men-at-arms stood before him, grim as he and as
+      discontented. They leaned on spears, at ease, and that seemed to annoy him
+      most of all. A spokesman stood out from the ranks and addressed him, with
+      gesticulations and a head so far thrown back that his helmet-plume stood
+      out like a secretary's pen behind him. He was not a Roman, although there
+      was something Roman about his attitude and armor. None of the men-at-arms
+      was a Roman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They demanded to be led home, wherever home was. (It was as plain as if
+      their spokesman had shouted it into King's ear aloud.) And he refused them
+      bluntly, proudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two men brought him a native woman, each holding an arm and thrusting her
+      forward between them. She was not at all unlike a native woman of to-day,
+      either in dress or sullenness; she had the beak and the keen eyes and the
+      cruel lips of the &ldquo;Hills.&rdquo; They showed her to him, and it was quite clear
+      that they compared her to their own women, left behind; the comparison was
+      plainly to her disadvantage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wasted no argument on them, but his scorn made the two men fade away,
+      and the woman with them. Yet he had no scorn for his lined-up fighting
+      men, and so could act none. He ordered the spokesman back to the ranks,
+      and the man obeyed. He gave another order, and the long lines stood at
+      attention, spears straight up and down, and their round sheilds like great
+      medallions on a wall. He ordered them away, but they stood still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he did a truly Roman thing. He got his harness off--unbuckled
+      and took off the great bronze corselet, in which he lay dead in another
+      cave. He threw it down--tore open the white shirt underneath--and
+      held his arms out. He bade them come and kill him. He bade them drive
+      their spears into his unprotected breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was not a movement down the line of men. They stood as a cliff looks
+      at the tide. He dared them. He called them cowards--women--weaklings
+      afraid of blood. But they stood still. He strode up and down the line,
+      seeking a man with heart enough to plunge a spear into him, and no man
+      moved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he stood still before them all again and wept, because they loved him
+      and he loved them. And then she came, not dancing this time, but
+      barefooted and walking like a poem of the early days of Greece. She picked
+      up his corselet and buckled it on him, making him hold up his arms and
+      kneel while she slipped it over his head. And the grim men-at-arms hove
+      their long spears up into the air and roared her an ovation, bringing down
+      their right feet with a thunder all together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ave!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the mist closed up and then the crystal was clear again. It was
+      Yasmini's voice that spoke, King looked up into her eyes, and they made
+      him shudder, for he had never seen eyes like them. Her hands still clasped
+      his own, burning hot. She was more terrible than Khinjan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never saw that before,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It is because you are here! We shall
+      see it all now! We shall know it all! We shall know whether it was she who
+      killed him, or whether his own men took him at his word. We shall know!
+      Look again! Look again!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His eyes seemed unable to obey his own will any longer. They obeyed her
+      voice. He gazed again into the crystal, and it clouded over. But although
+      he obeyed her, the crystal obeyed him and answered at least in part the
+      questions his imagination asked. He was not conscious of asking anything,
+      but being a soldier his curiosity followed a more or less definite line.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yasmini's breath began to come and go again with the little hissing sound.
+      Her hot hands pressed his own. The mist suddenly dissolved. There was a
+      road--a long white road, across a plain, and the men-at-arms fought
+      their way along it. They were facing east.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Archers opposed them--archers on foot, and cavalry--Parthians.
+      The Parthians were wild, but the drill of the men-at-arms was a thing to
+      marvel at. When the flights of arrows came they knelt behind their
+      shields. When the horsemen charged they closed in solid phalanx, and the
+      inner ranks hurled javelins at ten-yard range. When the fury of the
+      onslaught died they formed in column and went forward, gaining furlongs at
+      a time while their enemy watched them and wondered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was plain that the enemy expected them to retreat sooner or later, for
+      the archers and cavalry were at great pains to get behind them, so that
+      before long the road ahead was less well defended than that behind. It did
+      not seem to occur to the enemy that they were pressing toward the distant
+      line of hills and did not seek to return at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had no baggage to impede them. It was absurd to suppose they would
+      not try to fight a way back soon. They must be a Roman raiding party, out
+      to teach Parthians a lesson. Yet they pressed ever forward, and the hills
+      grew ever nearer; while he sat a great brown charger calmly in their midst
+      and gave them not too many orders, but here and there a word of praise,
+      and once or twice a trumpet shout of encouragement. He seemed to own the
+      knack of being wherever the fight was fiercest. His mere presence seemed
+      better than a hundred men when the phalanx bent before charging cavalry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She rode a little white horse, beside him always and utterly scornful of
+      the risk. She wore no armor--carried no shield. Her bare feet showed
+      through the sandal straps, and the outlines of her lissom body were quite
+      visible through the muslin stuff she wore. She might have just come from
+      the dancing. She had a flower in her hand, and a wreath of flowers in her
+      hair. She shouted more encouragement than he. She shouted too much. Once
+      he laid a strong brown hand across her mouth, and she held it there and
+      kissed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They lost men--five or six or ten or twenty at each onslaught.
+      Perhaps they had been a thousand strong in the beginning. Their own men--the
+      regimental surgeons probably--cut the throats of the badly wounded,
+      to save them from the enemy's attentions; and by this time they were not
+      more than seven or eight hundred strong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But they went forward--ever forward--and the line of hills drew
+      near. Then he began to stir himself, and she with him. He shouted to them
+      to charge, and she echoed him, leaving his side at last to take command of
+      a wing and sting the tired-out men-at-arms into new enthusiasm. In a
+      minute they were a roaring tide that swept forward to the foot of the
+      hills and surged upward without a check. In a little while they were
+      hurling boulders down on an enemy that seemed inclined to parley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, like a shadow of the incense cloud above, the mist closed up in the
+      crystal again, and in a moment more King and Yasmini were looking into
+      each other's eyes again above it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have seen that before,&rdquo; she said, shaking her, head. &ldquo;I am weary of
+      their battles. They won; that is enough! I must know how they failed, so
+      that we make no such mistakes!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her face was flushed, and her eyes glowed with the fire that is not lit by
+      ordinary passion. She was being eaten by ambition--burned by her own
+      fire--by ambition not totally selfish, for she yearned to shepherd
+      King as she seemed to think this woman of the vision had not shepherded
+      the man in armor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look again!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Look again! And oh, ye old gods, show--show
+      me wherein she failed!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They stared again, and once more the crystal clouded. Out of the cloud
+      came a city in the middle of a plain, and the city was besieged. It was
+      not a very great city, but from the outside it looked rich, for domes and
+      roofs and towers showed above the wall, all well built and well preserved.
+      He and she, sitting their horses out of arrow range from the main gate
+      seemed confident of taking it and eager to get it over with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They no longer had only six or seven hundred men, but men by the thousand.
+      Their veterans in Roman armor were in command of others now, and they had
+      a human pack-train with them, heavily burdened captives who sulked in
+      chains under a guard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mist cleared further, and the gate gave in under the blows of an
+      improvised battering-ram, covered by showers of arrows from short range.
+      Then, like a river breaking down a dam, the thousands stormed in, howling.
+      Smoke rose. There were screams of women. A great tower near the gate, that
+      was half wood, half stone, crackled and curled up in yellow and crimson
+      flame. He and she rode in together as modern men and women ride through a
+      gate to the covert side at a fox-hunt. They chatted and laughed together,
+      and their horses pranced, responding to the humor of their riders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King would have liked to tear his eyes away from the scenes that followed
+      in the tree-lined streets, but the crystal ball held him as if in a trance--that
+      and Yasmini's hands that clasped his own like hot torture chamber clamps.
+      Animals fighting to the death are not so vile, nor so inhuman as men can
+      be in the hour of what they call victory. Even the little children of that
+      city paid the penalty for having closed the gate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Time was no measure to the crystal ball. In minutes it showed the devil's
+      work of hours. The city went up in smoke and flame, and from the far side
+      through a great breach in the wall the conquerors went out, with their
+      plunder and such prisoners as had been saved to drag and carry it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now there were wagons and camels and horses. Now there were tents and
+      furniture. Now each man of the fighting force had as much as he himself
+      could carry, as well as what was loaded on the prisoners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only he and she seemed to care nothing for the loot and rode as if each
+      was all the other needed. Still he wore nothing but his armor, and she no
+      more than her dancing dress and sandals. But now she had eight prisoners
+      to hold a panoply above her horse and keep the sun from her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had flowers woven in her hair, and others in her hand, as if she rode
+      from a bridal feast and were not in mourning for a plundered, butchered
+      city. They were headed northward now, toward distant mountains, and the
+      dust of their long column went up like a river of smoke, flowing from the
+      holocaust behind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yasmini shook her head impatiently. The crystal clouded over, and King's
+      eyes were free.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am tired of it,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I have seen that so many times. I know they
+      won. I know they found their way to Khinjan. I know they began to build an
+      empire here. I have seen all that a hundred times. What I must know is
+      what mistake they made. What did they do wrong? How did they come to fail?
+      Look again! Let us look again!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She never once let King's hands go, but pressed them tighter and tighter
+      until the circulation nearly stopped and they grew numb. Her own strength
+      seemed endless--to grow rather than to wane in proportion as her
+      yearning to look into the past grew. Her attitude would have been more
+      understandable if she had believed herself and King to be reincarnations
+      of those forgotten conquerors; but she was too original for that. She had
+      said the old gods wished, and the man and the woman were; the old gods
+      wished the same wish again, and she and King were. Why then, if the old
+      gods were contriving it all, should she seek to steady the ark for them?
+      But down at bottom there is no logic connected with gods many. She
+      clutched King's fingers as if to hold him there, and to make him see and
+      understand the distant past, were the only way to save him from mistakes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look!&rdquo; she insisted. &ldquo;Look again!&rdquo; And he obeyed her. By this time
+      obedience was much the easiest course. Between times his eyes were so
+      weary he could hardly hold them open, and it was only when he gazed into
+      the crystal that he could rest them and feel easy. He knew well that she
+      was winning control over him in some sort, and he fought against it
+      grimly. Soon he became weirdly conscious of being two men--one, whom
+      she had grasped and overcome, a physical man who did not matter much, and
+      another, mental man who was free from her, who could understand her, whom
+      she could not reach or touch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look!&rdquo; she insisted. &ldquo;Look!&rdquo; And the crystal clouded over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He strode out of the mist again, frowning, with his chin hung low and
+      fists clenched tight at his sides. Four of his own men came out of the
+      mist to him and greeted him respectfully, yet not without a touch of
+      irony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They spoke to him and pointed westward. One laid a hand on his shoulder,
+      but he shook it off and the man reeled back as if he had been struck.
+      Another man took up the argument, but he shook his head. They all spoke
+      together, gesticulating and growing angry; but he stood calm among them,
+      as a rock stands in a storm. He folded his arms across his breast after a
+      while and listened, saying nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then as if to end the argument for good and all, he drew his sword and
+      held it out toward them, hilt first, telling them again to kill him and
+      have done with it. They refused. He laughed at them, but they still
+      refused; so he put his sword back in the sheath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the men stepped into the mist and disappeared. Presently he came
+      again, with two others, helping a wounded man along between them. Whoever
+      the wounded man might be he was treated with respect. Prouder than
+      Lucifer, he who had struck another man's hand from off his shoulder knelt
+      to give this wounded man a knee and seemed pained when the man refused
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wounded man pointed to the westward too and argued in short
+      clipped-off sentences. He had a day or two to live--certainly not
+      longer, for the blood flowed slowly from a wound that would not stanch;
+      yet he argued as a man who has lost no interest in life, but rather sees
+      its problems truly now that his own are near an end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He demanded something almost truculently. He took his helmet off and
+      passed it down to him. With fingers that were growing feeble the wounded
+      man held it and traced out the letters S. P. Q. R. on the front.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go home!&rdquo; he said, passing it back to him. &ldquo;Fight your way back home!&rdquo;
+       What he said was as distinct as if a voice in the cave had spoken it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, vision within a vision--dream within a dream--there was a
+      view of the Via Appia, with gaunt grim gallows set along it in a row and
+      on them a regiment's commander crucified along with the remnant of his
+      men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So Rome treats traitors!&rdquo; said a voice, that might have been either
+      man's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But instantly there was another vision, of ten thousand wolves baying down
+      a Himalayan gorge in winter-time, the sleet frozen stiff on their fur and
+      their tongues hanging. Eye and fang flashed altogether and made one gleam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Choose!&rdquo; said a voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he chose. He nodded. The men saluted him, and the wounded man was
+      helped away to die. And then she came, angry as a flash of lightning, to
+      spring at him and cling to him and call him names--begging,
+      demanding, ordering, crying--abusing him and praising him in turn. He
+      shook his head. She sobbed, but he shook his head again and pointed
+      westward. Then she took him by the hand and led him away, not looking at
+      his face again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The crystal ball grew clouded. Yasmini's breath came and went as if she
+      were running in a race, and her pressure on King's fingers was actually
+      painful. The mist dissolved, and King forgot the pressure--forgot
+      everything. The man in armor lay dead on his back in the cave on the
+      wooden bed, and she bent over him, dagger in hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said Yasmini, her teeth chattering. &ldquo;But what else could she do?&rdquo;
+       The mist closed in again and the crystal grew opaque. &ldquo;The future!&rdquo; she
+      begged. &ldquo;It is the future I must know! Ye old gods, tell me! Show me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The mist turned red. The crystal ball became as it were a ball of fire
+      revolving within itself. The fire turned to blood, and the blood to fire
+      again. The very cavern that they knelt in seemed to sway. Yasmini screamed
+      and moaned. She loosed King's hands to cover her own eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as she did that King sank, like a sack half-empty and toppled over
+      sidewise on the floor asleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He neither dreamed nor was conscious of anything, but slept like a dead
+      man, having fought against her mesmerism harder than he knew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Statesmen, generals, outlaws, all make their big mistakes and manage to
+      recover. Very nearly always it is an apparently little mistake that does
+      most damage in the end, something unnoticeable at the time, that grows in
+      geometrical proportion, minus instead of plus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yasmini made her little mistake that minute in believing King was utterly
+      mesmerized at last and utterly in her power. Whereas in truth he was only
+      weary. It may be that she gave him orders in his sleep, after the accepted
+      manner of mesmerists; but if she did, they never reached him; he was far
+      too fast asleep. He slept so deep and long that he was not conscious of
+      men's voices, nor of being carried, nor of time, nor of anxiety, nor of
+      anything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter XVI
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Wolf met wolf in the dawning day
+     Where scent hung sweet over trodden clay,
+     And square each stood in the jungle way
+     Eyeing the other with ears laid back.
+     Still were the watchers.  When foe greets foe
+     The wisest are quietest.  Better to go--
+     Who stays to watch trouble woos trouble!
+             But lo!
+     They trotted together to hunt one doe,
+     Eyeing each other with ears laid back.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      When King awoke he lay on a comfortable bed in a cave he had never yet
+      seen, but there was no trace of Yasmini, nor of the men who must have
+      carried him to it. Barbaric splendor and splendor that was not by any
+      means barbaric lay all about--tiger skins, ivory-legged chairs,
+      graven bronze vases, and a yak-hair shawl worth a rajah's ransom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cave was spacious and not gloomy, for there was a wide door,
+      apparently unguarded, and another square opening cut in the rock to serve
+      as a window. Through both openings light streamed in like taut threads of
+      Yasmini's golden hair--strings of a golden zither, on which his own
+      heart's promptings played a tune.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had no idea how long he had slept, but judged from memory of his former
+      need of sleep and recogntion of his present freshness--and from the
+      fact that it was a morning sun that shone through the openings--that
+      he must have slept the clock round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It did not matter. He knew it did not matter in the least. He had no more
+      plan than a mathematician has who starts to solve a problem, knowing that
+      twice two is four in infinite combination. Like the mathematician, he knew
+      that he must win.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No man ever won a battle or conceived a stroke of statesmanship, no great
+      deed was ever accomplished without a first taste of the triumphant
+      foreknowledge, such as comes only to men who have digged hard, hewing to
+      the line, loyal to first principles. King had been loyal all his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The difference between first principles and the other thing could hardly
+      be better illustrated than by comparing Yasmini's position with his. From
+      her point of view he had no ground to stand on, unless he should choose to
+      come and stand on hers. She had men, ammunition, information. He had what
+      he stood in, and his only information had been poured into his ears for
+      her ends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet his heart sang inside him now; and he trusted it because that singing
+      never had deceived him. He did not believe she would have left him alone
+      at that state of affairs unless through over-confidence. It is one of the
+      absolute laws that over-confidence begets blindness and mistakes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had staked on what seemed to her the certainty of India's rising at
+      the first signal of a holy war. She believed from close acquaintance that
+      India was utterly disloyal, having made a study of disloyalty. And having
+      read history she knew that many a conqueror has staked on such cards as
+      hers, to win for lack of a better man to take the other side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But King had studied loyalty all his life, and he knew that besides being
+      the home of money-lenders, thugs, and murderers, India is the very
+      motherland of chivalry; that besides sedition she breeds gentlemen with
+      stout hearts; that in addition to what one Christian Book calls &ldquo;whoring
+      after strange gods&rdquo; India strives after purity. He knew that India's
+      ideals are all imperishable, and her crimes but a kaleidoscopic phase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not that he was analyzing thoughts just then. He was listening to the
+      still small voice that told him half of his purpose was accomplished. He
+      had probed Khinjan Caves, and knew the whole purpose for which the lawless
+      thousands had been gathering and were gathering still. Remained, to thwart
+      that purpose. And he had no more doubt of there being a means to thwart it
+      than a mathematician has of the result of two times two, applied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Like a mathematician, he did not waste time and confuse issues by casting
+      too far ahead, but began to devote himself steadily to the figures
+      nearest. Knots are not untied by wholesale, but are conquered strand by
+      strand. He began at the beginning, where he stood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He became conscious of human life near by and tip-toed to the door to
+      look. A six-foot ledge of smooth rock ended just at the door and sloped in
+      the other direction sharply downward toward another opening in the cliff
+      side, three or four hundred yards away and two hundred feet lower down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Behind him in a corner at the back of the cave was a narrow fissure, hung
+      with a leather curtain, that was doubtless the door into Khinjan's heart;
+      but the only way to the outer air was along that ledge above a dizzying
+      precipice, so high that the huge waterfall looked like a little stream
+      below. He was in a very eagle's aerie; the upper rim of Khinjan's gorge
+      seemed not more than a quarter of a mile above him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Round the corner, ten feet from the entrance, stood a guard, armed to the
+      teeth, with a rifle, a sword, two pistols and a long curved Khyber knife
+      stuck handy in his girdle. He spoke to the man and received no answer. He
+      picked up a splinter of rock and threw it. The fellow looked at him then.
+      He spoke again. The man transferred his rifle to the other hand and made
+      signs with his free fingers. King looked puzzled. The man opened his mouth
+      and showed that his tongue was missing. He had been made dumb, as pegs are
+      made to fit square holes. King went in again, to wait on events and
+      shudder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor did he have long to wait. There came a sound of grunting, up the rock
+      path. Then footsteps. Then a hoarse voice, growling orders. He went out
+      again to look, and beheld a little procession of women, led by a man. The
+      man was armed, but the women were burdened with his own belongings--the
+      medicine chest--his saddle and bridle--his unrifled mule-pack--and,
+      wonder of wonders! the presents Khinjan's sick had given him, including
+      money and weapons. They came past the dumb man on guard and laid them all
+      at King's feet just inside the cave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled, with that genial, face-transforming smile of his that has so
+      often melted a road for him through sullen crowds. But the man in charge
+      of the women did not grin. He was suffering. He growled at the women, and
+      they went away like obedient animals, to sit half-way down the ledge and
+      await further orders. He himself made as if to follow them, and the dumb
+      man on guard did not pay much attention; he let women and man pass behind
+      him, stepping one pace forward toward the edge to make more room. That was
+      his last entirely voluntary act in this world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a suddenness that disarmed all opposition the other humped himself
+      against the wall and bucked into the dumb man's back, sending him, weapons
+      and all, hurtling over the precipice. With a wild effort to recover, and
+      avenge himself, and do his duty, the victim fired his rifle, that was
+      ready cocked. The bullet struck the rock above and either split or shook a
+      great fragment loose, that hurtled down after him, so that he and the
+      stone made a race of it for the waterfall and the caverns into which the
+      water tumbled thousands of feet away. The other ruffian spat after him,
+      and then walked back to where King stood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now heal me my boils!&rdquo; he said, grinning at last, doubtless from pleasure
+      at the prospect. He was the same man who had stood on guard at the
+      &ldquo;guest-cave&rdquo; when Ismail led King out to see the Cavern of Earth's Drink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The temptation was to fling the brute after his victim. The temptation
+      always is to do the wrong thing--to cap wrath with wrath, injustice
+      with vengeance. That way wars begin and are never ended. King beckoned him
+      into the cave, and bent over the chest of medical supplies. Then, finding
+      the light better for his purpose at the entrance, he called the man back
+      and made him sit down on the box.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The business of lancing boils is not especially edifying in itself; but
+      that particular minor operation probably saved India. But for hope of it
+      the man with boils would never have stood two turns on guard hand running
+      and let the relief sleep on; so he would not have been on duty when the
+      message came to carry King's belongings to his new cave of residence.
+      There would have been no object in killing the dumb man and so there would
+      have been an expert with a loaded rifle to keep Muhammad Anim lurking down
+      the trail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Muhammad Anim came--like the devil to scotch King's faith. He had
+      followed the women with the loads. He stood now, like a big bear on a
+      mountain track, swaying his head from side to side six feet away from
+      King, watching the boils succumb to treatment. He grunted when the job was
+      finished, and King jumped, nearly driving the lance into a new place in
+      his patient's neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let him go!&rdquo; growled Muhammad Anim. &ldquo;Go thou! Stand guard over the women
+      until I come!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The mullah turned a rifle this way and that in his paws, like a great bear
+      dancing. The Mahsudi with a sore neck could have shot him perhaps, but
+      there are men with whom only the bravest dare try conclusions. In cold
+      gray dawn it would have needed a martinet to make a firing squad do
+      execution on Muhammad Anim, even with his hands tied and his back against
+      a wall. A man whose boils had just been lanced was no match for him at
+      all, even in broad daylight. The Hillman slunk away and did as he was
+      told.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What meant thy message?&rdquo; growled the mullah. &ldquo;There came a Pathan to me
+      in the Cavern of Earth's Drink with word that yonder sits a hakim. What of
+      it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King had almost forgotten the message he had sent to Muhammad Anim in the
+      Cavern of Earth's Drink. But that was not why his eyes looked past the
+      mullah's now, nor why he did not answer. The mullah did not look round,
+      for he knew what was happening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The very Orakzai Pathan who had sat next King in the Cavern of Earth's
+      Drink, and who had carried the message for him, was creeping up behind the
+      women and already had his rifle leveled at the man with boils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo; said the mullah, watching King's eyes. &ldquo;He has done well, and the
+      road is clear!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man with boils offered no fight. He dropped his rifle and threw his
+      hands up. In a moment the Orakzai Pathan was in command of two rifles,
+      holding them in one hand and nodding and making signs to King from among
+      the women, whom he seemed to regard as his plunder too. The women appeared
+      supremely indifferent in any event. King nodded back to him. A friend is a
+      friend in the &ldquo;Hills,&rdquo; and rare is the man who spares his enemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why send that message to me?&rdquo; asked Muhammad Anim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo; asked King. &ldquo;If none know where the hakim is, how shall the
+      hakim earn a living?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None comes to earn a living in the Hills,&rdquo; growled the mullah, swaying
+      his head slowly and devouring King with cruel calculating eyes. &ldquo;Why art
+      thou here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I slew a man,&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou liest! It was my men who got the head that let thee in! Speak! Why
+      art thou here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But King did not answer. The mullah resumed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He who brought me the message yesterday says he has it from another, who
+      had it from a third, that thou art here because she plans a simultaneous
+      rising in India, and thou art from the Punjab where the Sikhs all wait to
+      rise. Is that true?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thy man said it,&rdquo; answered King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What sayest thou?&rdquo; the mullah asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say nothing,&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then hear me!&rdquo; said the mullah. &ldquo;Listen, thou.&rdquo; But he did not begin to
+      speak yet. He tried to see past King into the cave and to peer about into
+      the shadows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is she?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;Her man Rewa Gunga went yesterday, with three
+      men and a letter to carry, down the Khyber. But where is she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So he had slept the clock round! King did not answer. He blocked the way
+      into the cave and looked past the mullah at a sight that fascinated, as a
+      serpent's eyes are said to fascinate a bird. But the mullah, who knew
+      perfectly well what must be happening, did not trouble to turn his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Orakzai Pathan crouched among the women, and the women grinned. The
+      Mahsudi, having surrendered and considering himself therefore absolved
+      from further responsibility at least for the present, spat over the
+      precipice and fingered gingerly the sore place where his boils had been.
+      He yawned and dropped both hands to his side; and it was at that instant
+      that the Pathan sprang at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With arms like the jaws of a vise he pinned the Mahsudi's to his side, and
+      lifted him from off his feet. The fellow screamed, and the Pathan shouted
+      &ldquo;Ho!&rdquo; But he did no murder yet. He let his victim grow fully conscious of
+      the fate in store for him, holding him so that his frantic kicks were
+      squandered on thin air. He turned him slowly, until he was upside-down;
+      and so, perpendicular, face-outward, he hove him forward like a dead log.
+      He stood and watched his victim fall two or three thousand feet before
+      troubling to turn and resume both rifles; and it was not until then, as if
+      he had been mentally conscious of each move, that the mullah turned to
+      look, and seeing only one man nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; he grunted. &ldquo;'Shabash!&rdquo;' (Well done!)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he turned his head to stare into King's face, with the scrutiny of a
+      trader appraising loot. Fire leaped up behind his calculating eyes. And
+      without a word passing between them, King knew that this man as well as
+      Yasmini was in possession of the secret of the Sleeper. Perhaps he knew it
+      first; perhaps she snatched the keeping of the secret from him. At all
+      events he knew it and recognized King's likeness to the Sleeper, for his
+      eyes betrayed him. He began to stroke his beard monotonously with one
+      hand. The rifle, that he pretended to be holding, really leaned against
+      his back and with the free hand he was making signals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King knew well he was making signals. But he knew too that in Yasmini's
+      power, her prisoner, he had no chance at all of interfering with her
+      plans. Having grounded on the bottom of impotence, so to speak, any tide
+      that would take him off must be a good tide. He pretended to be aware of
+      nothing, and to be particularly unaware that the Pathan, with a rifle in
+      each hand, was pretending to come casually up the path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a minute he was covered by a rifle. In another minute the mullah had
+      lashed his hands. In five minutes more the women were loaded again with
+      his belongings and they were all half-way down the track in single file,
+      the mullah bringing up the rear, descending backward with rifle ready
+      against surprise, as if he expected Yasmini and her men to pounce out any
+      minute to the rescue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They entered a tunnel and wound along it, stepping at short intervals over
+      the bodies of three stabbed sentries. The Pathan spurned them with his
+      heel as he passed. In the glare at the tunnel's mouth King tripped over
+      the body of a fourth man and fell with his chin beyond the edge of a sheer
+      precipice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were on a ledge above the waterfall again, having come through a
+      projection on the cliff's side, for Khinjan is all rat-runs and
+      projections, like a sponge or a hornet's nest on a titanic scale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pathan laughed and came back to gather him like a sheaf of corn. The
+      great smelly ruffian hugged him to himself as he set him on his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! Thou hakim!&rdquo; he grinned. &ldquo;There is no pain in my shoulder at all! Ask
+      of me another favor when the time comes! Hey, but I am sick of Khinjan!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave King a shove along the path in the general direction of the
+      mullah. Then he seized the dead body by the legs, and hurled it like a
+      sling shot, watching it with a grin as it fell in a wide parabola. After
+      that he took the dead man's rifle, and those of the three other dead men,
+      that he had hidden in a crevice in the rock, and loaded them all on a
+      woman in addition to King's saddle that she carried already.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Hurry, or Bull-with-a-beard yonder will remember us
+      again. I love him best when he forgets!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They soon reached another cave, at which the mullah stopped. It was a dark
+      ill-smelling hole, but he ordered King into it and the Pathan after him on
+      guard, after first seeing the women pile all their loads inside. Then he
+      took the women away and went off muttering to himself, swaggering,
+      swinging his right arm as he strode, in a way few natives do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us hope he has forgotten these!&rdquo; the Pathan grinned, touching the
+      pile of rifles. &ldquo;Weight for weight in silver they will bring me a fine
+      price! He may forget. He dreams. For a mullah he cares less for meat and
+      money than any I ever saw. He is mad, I think. It is my opinion Allah
+      touched him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is that, under thy shirt?&rdquo; King asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pathan grinned, and undid the button. There was a second shirt
+      underneath, and to that on the left breast were pinned two British medals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes!&rdquo; he laughed. &ldquo;I served the raj! I was in the army eleven years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did you leave it?&rdquo; King asked, remembering that this man loved to
+      hear his own voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I had furlough, and the bastard who stood next me in the ranks was
+      the son of a dog with whom my father had a blood-feud. The blind fool did
+      not know me. He received his furlough on the same day as I. I would not
+      lay finger on him that side of the border, for we ate the same salt. I
+      knifed him this side the border. It was no affair of the British. But I
+      was seen, and I fled. And having slain a man, and having no doubt a report
+      had gone back to the regiment, I entered this place. Except for a raid now
+      and then to cool my blood I have been here ever since. It is a devil of a
+      place.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now the art of ruling India consists not in treading barefooted on
+      scorpions--not in virtuous indignation at men who know no better--but
+      in seeking for and making much of the gold that lies ever amid the dross.
+      There is gold in the character of any man who once passed the grilling
+      tests before enlistment in a British-Indian regiment. It may need
+      experience to lay a finger on it, but it is surely there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I heard,&rdquo; said King, &ldquo;as I came toward the Khyber in great haste (for the
+      police were at my heels)--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, the police!&rdquo; the Pathan grinned pleasantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The inference was that at some time or other he had left his mark on the
+      police.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I heard,&rdquo; said King, &ldquo;that men are flocking back to their old regiments.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye, but not men with a price on their heads, little hakim!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could not say,&rdquo; said King. To seem to know too much is as bad as to
+      drink too much. &ldquo;But I heard say that the sirkar has offered pardons to
+      all deserters who return.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hah! The sirkar must be afraid. The sirkar needs men!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For myself,&rdquo; said King, &ldquo;a whole skin in the 'Hills' seems better than
+      one full of bullet holes in India.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hah! But thou art a hakim, not a soldier!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;True!&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me that again! Free pardons? Free pardons for all deserters?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I heard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! But I was seen to slay a man of my own regiment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On this side the border or that?&rdquo; asked King artfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On this side.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, but you were seen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay! But that is no man's business. In India I earned in my salt. I obeyed
+      the law. There is no law here in the 'Hills.' I am minded to go back and
+      seek that pardon! It would feel good to stand in the rank again, with a
+      stiff-backed sahib out in front of me, and the thunder of the gun-wheels
+      going by. The salt was good! Come thou with me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The pardon is for deserters,&rdquo; King objected, &ldquo;not for political
+      offenders.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Haugh!&rdquo; said the Pathan, bringing down his flat hand hard on the hakim's
+      thigh. &ldquo;I will attend to that for thee. I will obtain my pardon first.
+      Then will I lead thee by the hand to the karnal sahib and lie to him and
+      say, 'This is the one who persuaded me against my will to come back to the
+      regiment!&rdquo;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he will believe? Nay, I would be afraid!&rdquo; said King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would a pardon not be good?&rdquo; the Pathan asked him. &ldquo;A pardon and leave to
+      swagger through the bazaars again and make trouble with the daughters and
+      wives of fat traders--a pardon--Allah! It would be good to
+      salute the karnal sahib again and see him raise a finger, thus; and to
+      have the captain sahib call me a scoundrel--or some worse name if he
+      loves me very much, for the English are a strange race--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou art a dreamer!&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;Untie my hands; the thong cuts me.&rdquo; The
+      Pathan obeyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dreamer, am I? It is good to dream such dreams. By Allah, I've a mind to
+      see that dream come true! I never slew a man on Indian soil, only in these
+      'Hills.' I will go to them and say 'Here I am! I am a deserter. I seek
+      that pardon!' 'Truly I will go! Come thou with me, little hakim!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay,&rdquo; said King, &ldquo;I have another thought.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You, who were seen to slay a man a yard this side of the border--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay; half a mile this side!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Half a mile, then. You who were seen to slay a fellow soldier of your
+      regiment, and I who am a political offender, do not win pardons so easily
+      as that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would they hang us?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was the first squeamishness the Pathan had shown of any kind, but men
+      of his race would rather be tortured to death than hanged in a merciful
+      hempen noose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They would hang us,&rdquo; said King, &ldquo;unless we came bearing gifts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gifts? Has Allah touched thee? What gifts should we bring? A dozen stolen
+      rifles? A bag of silver? And I am the dreamer, am I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay,&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;I am the dreamer. I have seen a good vision.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are others in these Hills--others in Khinjan who wear British
+      medals?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pathan nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How many?&rdquo; asked King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hundreds. Men fight first on one side, then on the other, being true to
+      either side while the contract lasts. In all there must be the makings of
+      many regiments among the 'Hills.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King nodded. He himself had seen the chieftains come to parley after the
+      Tirah war. Most of them had worn British medals and had worn them proudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If we two,&rdquo; he said, speaking slowly, &ldquo;could speak with some of those men
+      and stir the spirit in them and persuade them to feel as thou dost,
+      mentioning the pardon for deserters and the probability of bonuses to the
+      time-expired for reenlistment; if we could march down the Khyber with a
+      hundred such, or even with fifty or with twenty-five or with a dozen men--we
+      would receive our pardon for the sake of service rendered.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pathan thumped him on the back so hard that his eyes watered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We would have to use much caution,&rdquo; King advised him, when he was able to
+      speak again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye! If Bull-with-a-beard got wind of it he would have us crucified. And
+      if she heard of it--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was silent. Apparently there were no words in his tongue that could
+      compass his dread of her revenge. He was silent for ten minutes, and King
+      sat still beside him, letting memory of other days do its work--memory
+      of the long, clean regimental lines, and of order and decency and of
+      justice handed out to all and sundry by gentlemen who did not think
+      themselves too good to wear a native regiment's uniform.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In two days I could do the drill again as well as ever,&rdquo; he said at last.
+      Then there was silence again for fifteen minutes more. &ldquo;I could always
+      shoot,&rdquo; he murmured; &ldquo;I could always shoot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Muhammad Anim came back they had both forgotten to replace the
+      lashing on King's wrists, but the mullah seemed not to notice it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; he ordered, with a sidewise jerk of his great ugly head, and then
+      stood muttering impatiently while they obeyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had twice the number of women with him, but none of them the same; and
+      he had brought five ruffians to guard them, who pounced on the captured
+      rifles and claimed one apiece, to the Pathan's loud-growled disgust. Then
+      the women were made to gather up King's belongings, and at a word from the
+      mullah they started in single file--the mullah leading, then two men,
+      then King, then the Orakzai Pathan, and then the other three. The Pathan
+      began to whisper busily to the man next behind and noticing that King
+      looked straight forward and contented himself; his heart was singing
+      within him unexplainedly; he wanted to sing and dance, as once David did
+      before the ark. He did not feel in the least like a prisoner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They marched downward through interminable tunnels and along ledges poised
+      between earth and heaven, until they came at last to the tunnel leading to
+      the one entrance into Khinjan Caves. Just before they entered it two more
+      of the mullah's men came up with them, leading horses. One horse was for
+      the mullah, and they helped King mount the other, showing him more respect
+      than is usually shown a prisoner in the &ldquo;Hills.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the mullah led the way into the tunnel, and he seemed in deadly fear.
+      The echo of the hoof-beats irritated him. He eyed each hole in the roof as
+      if Yasmini might be expected to shoot down at him or drench him with
+      boiling oil and hurried past each of them at a trot, only to draw rein
+      immediately afterward because the noise was too great.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It became evident that his men had been at work here too, for at intervals
+      along the passage lay dead bodies. Yasmini must have posted the men there,
+      but where was she? Each of them lay dead with a knife wound in his back,
+      and the mullah's men possessed themselves of rifles and knives and
+      cartridges, wiping off blood that had scarcely cooled yet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they came to the end of the tunnel it was to find the door into the
+      mosque open in front of them, and twenty more of Muhammad Anim's men
+      standing guard over the eyelashless mullah. They had bound and gagged him.
+      At a word from Muhammad Anim they loosed him; and at a threat the hairless
+      one gave a signal that brought the great stone door sliding forward on its
+      oiled bronze grooves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, with a dozen jests thrown to the hairless one for consolation, and
+      an utter indifference to the sacredness of the mosque floor, they sought
+      outer air, and Muhammad Anim led them up the Street of the Dwellings
+      toward Khinjan's outer ramparts. They reached the outer gate without
+      incident and hurried into the great dry valley beyond it. As they rode
+      across the valley the mullah thumbed a long string of beads. Unlike
+      Yasmini, he was praying to one god; but he seemed to have many prayers.
+      His back was a picture of determined treachery--the backs of his men
+      were expressions of the creed that &ldquo;He shall keep who can!&rdquo; King rode all
+      but last now and had a good view of their unconsciously vaunted
+      blackguardism. There was not a hint of honor or tenderness among the lot,
+      man, woman or mullah. Yet his heart sang within him as if he were riding
+      to his own marriage feast!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Last of all, close behind him, marched his friend, the Orakzai Pathan, and
+      as they picked their way among the boulders across the mile-wide moat the
+      two contrived to fall a little to the rear. The Pathan began speaking in a
+      whisper and King, riding with lowered head as if he were studying the
+      dangerous track, listened with both ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She sent her man Rewa Gunga toward the Khyber with a message,&rdquo; he
+      whispered. &ldquo;He took a few men with him, and he is to send them with the
+      message when they reach the Khyber, but he is to come back. All he went
+      for is to make sure the message is not intercepted, for Bull-with-a-beard
+      is growing reckless these days. He knew what was doing and said at once
+      that she is treating with the British, but there were few who believed
+      that. There are more who wonder where she hides while the message is on
+      its way. None has seen her. Men have swarmed into the Cavern of Earth's
+      Drink and howled for her, but she did not come. Then the mullah went to
+      look for his ammunition that he stored and sealed in a cave. And it was
+      gone. It was all gone. And there was no proof of who had taken it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hakim, there be some who say--and Bull-with-a-beard is one of them--that
+      she is afraid and hides. Men say she fears vengeance for the stolen
+      ammunition, because it was plenty for a conquest of India. So men say. So
+      say these here, for I have asked them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And thou?&rdquo; asked King, struggling to keep the note of exultation from his
+      voice. He did not believe she was hiding. She might be staring into a
+      crystal in some secret cave--she might be planning new mischief of
+      any kind. But afraid she was surely not. And just as surely he could vow
+      she was working out her own undoing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I?&rdquo; said the Pathan. &ldquo;I swear she is afraid of nothing. If she has taken
+      all the ammunition, then we shall hear from it again and from her too!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what of me?&rdquo; asked King. &ldquo;What will the mullah do with me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His men say he is desperate. His own are losing faith in him. He snatched
+      thee to be a bait for her, having it in mind that a man whom she hides in
+      her private part of Khinjan must be of great value to her. He has sworn to
+      have thee skinned alive on a hot rock should she fail to come to terms!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That being not such a comforting reflection, King rode in silence for a
+      while, with the Pathan trudging solemnly beside his stirrup keeping
+      semblance of guard over him. When they reached the steep escarpment he had
+      to dismount, although the mullah in the lead tried to make his own beast
+      carry him up the lower spur and was mad--angry with his men for
+      laughing when the horse fell back with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Far in the rear King and the Pathan shoved and hauled and nearly lost
+      their horse a dozen times at that. But once at the top the mullah set a
+      furious pace and the laden women panted in their efforts to keep up, the
+      men taking less notice of them than if they had been animals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The march went on in single file until the sun died down in splendid fury.
+      Then there began to be a wind that they had to lean against, but the women
+      were allowed no rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last at a place where the trail began to widen, the mullah beckoned
+      King to ride beside him. It was not that he wished to be communicative,
+      but there were things King knew that he did not know, and he had his own
+      way of asking questions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damned hakim!&rdquo; he growled. &ldquo;Pill-man! Poulticer! That is a sweeper's
+      trade of thine! Thou shalt apply it at my camp! I have some wounded and
+      some sick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King did not answer, but buttoned his coat closer against the keen wind.
+      The mullah mistook the shudder for one of another kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did she choose thee only for thy face?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;Did she not consider
+      thy courage? Does she love thee well enough to ransom thee?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again King did not answer, but he watched the mullah's face keenly in the
+      dark and missed nothing of its expression. He decided the man was in doubt---even
+      racked by indecision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Should she not ransom thee, hakim, thou shall have a chance to show my
+      men how a man out of India can die! By and by I will lend thee a messenger
+      to send to her. Better make the message clear and urgent! Thou shalt state
+      my terms to her and plead thine own cause in the same letter. My camp lies
+      yonder.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He motioned with one sweep of his arm toward a valley that lay in shadow
+      far below them. As far as the slope leading down to it was visible in the
+      moonlight it was littered with what the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; call &ldquo;hell-stones,&rdquo; that
+      will neither lie flat nor keep on rolling, and are dangerous to man and
+      beast alike. Nothing else could be made out through the darkness but a few
+      twisted tamarisk trees, that served to make the savagery yet more savage
+      and the loneliness more desolate. The gloom below the trees was that of
+      the very underdepths of hell itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mullah pointed to a rock that rose like a shadow from the deeper
+      blackness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said King, &ldquo;I have seen.&rdquo; And the mullah stared at him. Then he
+      shouted, and the top of the rock turned into a man, who gave them leave to
+      advance, leaning on his rifle as one who had assured himself of their
+      identity long minutes ago.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As they approached it the rock clove in two and became two great pillars,
+      with a man on each. And between the pillars they looked down into a valley
+      lit by fires that burned before a thousand hide tents, with shadows by the
+      hundred flitting back and forth between them. A dull roar, like the voice
+      of an army, rose out of the gorge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;More than four thousand men!&rdquo; said the mullah proudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are four thousand for a raid into India?&rdquo; sneered King, greatly
+      daring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait and see!&rdquo; growled the mullah; but he seemed depressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He led the way downward, getting off his horse and giving the reins to a
+      man. King copied him, and part-way sliding, part stumbling down they found
+      their way along the dry bed of a water-course between two spurs of a
+      hillside, until they stood at last in the midst of a cluster of a dozen
+      sentries, close to a tamarisk to which a man's body hung spiked. That the
+      man had been spiked to it alive was suggested by the body's attitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without a word to the sentries the mullah led on down a lane through the
+      midst of the camp, toward a great open cave at the far side, in which a
+      bonfire cast fitful light and shadow. Watchers sitting by the thousand
+      tents yawned at them, but took no particular notice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mouth of the cave was like a lion's, fringed with teeth. There were
+      men in it, ten or eleven of them, all armed, squatting round the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get out!&rdquo; growled the mullah. But they did not obey. They sat and stared
+      at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have ye tents?&rdquo; the mullah asked, in a voice like thunder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo; But they did not go yet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the men, he nearest the mullah, got on his feet, but he had to step
+      back a pace, for the mullah would not give ground and their breath was in
+      each other's faces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where are the bombs? And the rifles? And the many cartridges?&rdquo; he
+      demanded. &ldquo;We have waited long, Muhammad Anim. Where are they now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The others got up, to lend the first man encouragement. They leaned on
+      rifles and surrounded the mullah, so that King could only get a glimpse of
+      him between them. They seemed in no mood to be treated cavalierly--in
+      no mood to be argued with. And the Mullah did not argue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ye dogs!&rdquo; he growled at them, and he strode through them to the fire and
+      chose himself a good, thick burning brand. &ldquo;Ye sons of nameless mothers!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he charged them suddenly, beating them over head and face and
+      shoulders, driving them in front of him, utterly reckless of their rifles.
+      His own rifle lay on the ground behind him, and King kicked its stock
+      clear of the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I shall pray for you this night!&rdquo; Muhammad Anim snarled. &ldquo;What a
+      curse I shall beg for you! Oh, what a burning of the bowels ye shall have!
+      What a sickness! What running of the eyes! What sores! What boils! What
+      sleepless nights and faithless women shall be yours! What a prayer I will
+      pray to Allah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They scattered into outer gloom before his rage, and then came back to
+      kneel to him and beg him withdraw his curse. He kicked them as they knelt
+      and drove them away again. Then, silhouetted in the cave mouth, with the
+      glow of the fire behind him, he stood with folded arms and dared them
+      shoot. He lacked little in that minute of being a full-grown brute at bay.
+      King admired him, with reservations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After five minutes of angry contemplation of the camp he turned on a
+      contemptuous heel and came back to the fire, throwing on more fuel from a
+      great pile in a corner. There was an iron pot in the embers. He seized a
+      stick and stirred the contents furiously, then set the pot between his
+      knees and ate like an animal. He passed the pot to King when he had
+      finished, but fingers had passed too many times through what was left in
+      it and the very thought of eating the mess made his gorge rise; so King
+      thanked him and set the pot aside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, &ldquo;That is thy place!&rdquo; Muhammad Anim growled, pointing over his
+      shoulder to a ledge of rock, like a shelf in the far wall. There was a bed
+      upon it, of cotton blankets stuffed with dry grass. King walked over and
+      felt the blankets and found them warm from the last man who had lain
+      there. They smelt of him too. He lifted them and laughed. Taking the whole
+      in both hands he carried it to the fire and threw it in, and the sudden
+      blaze made the mullah draw away a yard; but it did not make him speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bugs!&rdquo; King explained, but the mullah showed no interest. He watched,
+      however, as King went back to the bed, and subsequent proceedings seemed
+      to fascinate him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of the chest that one of the women had set down King took soap. There
+      was a pitcher of water between him and the fire; he carried it nearer.
+      With an improvised scrubbing brush of twigs he proceeded to scrub every
+      inch of the rock-shelf, and when he had done and had dried it more or
+      less, he stripped and began to scrub himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who taught thee thy squeamishness?&rdquo; the mullah asked at last, getting up
+      and coming nearer. It was well that King's skin was dark (although it was
+      many shades lighter than his face, that had been stained so carefully).
+      The mullah eyed him from head to foot and looked awfully suspicious, but
+      something prompted King and he answered without an instant's hesitation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why ask a woman's questions?&rdquo; he retorted. &ldquo;Only women ask when they know
+      the answer. When I watched thee with the firebrand a short while ago, oh,
+      mullah, I mistook thee for a man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The mullah grunted and began to tug his beard. But King said no more and
+      went on washing himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I forgot,&rdquo; said the mullah then, &ldquo;that thou art her pet. She would not
+      love thee unless thy smell was sweet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said King quite cheerfully--going it blind, for he did not know
+      what had possessed him to take that line, but knew he might as well be
+      hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. &ldquo;No, if I stank like thee she would not
+      love me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The mullah snorted and went back to the fire, but he took King's cake of
+      soap with him and sat examining it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tauba!&rdquo; he swore suddenly as if he had made a gruesome discovery. &ldquo;Such
+      filthy stuff is made from the fat of pigs!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doubtless!&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;That is why she uses it, and why I use it. She is
+      a better Muhammadan than thou. She would surely cleanse her skin with the
+      fat of pigs!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou art a shameless one!&rdquo; said the mullah, shaking his head like a bear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am what Allah made me!&rdquo; answered King, and then, for the sake of the
+      impression, he went through the outward form of muslim prayer, spreading a
+      mat and omitting none of the genuflections. When he had finished he
+      unfolded his own blankets that a woman had thrown down beside the chest
+      and spread them carefully on the rock-shelf. But though he was allowed to
+      climb up and lie there, he was not allowed to sleep--nor did he want
+      to sleep--for more than an hour to come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mullah came over from the fire again and stood beside him, glaring
+      like a great animal and grumbling in his beard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does she surely love thee?&rdquo; he asked at last, and King nodded, because he
+      knew he was on the trail of information.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So thou art to ape the Sleeper in his bronze mail, eh? Thou art to come
+      to life, as she was said to come to life, and the two of you are to
+      plunder India? Is that it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King nodded again, for a nod is less committal than a word; and the nod
+      was enough to start the mullah off again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw the Sleeper and his bride before she knew of either! It was I who
+      let her into Khinjan! It was I who told the men she is the 'Heart of the
+      Hills' come to life! She tricked me! But this is no hour for bearing
+      grudges. She has a plan and I am minded to help.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King lay still and looked up at him, sure that treachery was the ultimate
+      end of any plan the mullah Muhammad Anim had. India has been saved by the
+      treachery of her enemies more often than ruined by false friends. So has
+      the world, for that matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A jihad when the right hour comes will raise the tribes,&rdquo; the mullah
+      growled. &ldquo;She and thou, as the Sleeper and his mate, could work wonders.
+      But who can trust her? She stole that head! She stole all the ammunition!
+      Does she surely love thee?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King nodded again, for modesty could not help him at that juncture. Love
+      and boastfulness go together in the &ldquo;Hills.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She shall have thee back, then, at a price!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King did not answer. His brown eyes watched the mullah's, and he drew his
+      breath in little jerks, lest by breathing aloud he should miss one word of
+      what, was coming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She shall have thee back against Khinjan and the ammunition! She and thou
+      shall have India, but I shall be the power behind you! She must give me
+      Khinjan and the ammunition! She must admit me to the inner caves, whence
+      her damned guards expelled me. I must have the reins in my two hands so!
+      Then, thou and she shall have the pomp and glitter while I guide!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King did not answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dost understand?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King murmured something unintelligible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Otherwise, I and my men will storm Khinjan, and she and thou shall go
+      down into Earth's Drink lashed together!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King shuddered, not because he felt afraid, but because some instinct told
+      him to make the mullah think him afraid. He was far too interested to be
+      fearful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ye shall both be tortured before the plunge into the river! She shall be
+      tortured in the Cavern of Earth's Drink before the men!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King shuddered again, this time without an effort. He could imagine the
+      thousands watching grimly while the flayer used his knife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have men in Khinjan! I have as many as she! On the day I march there
+      will be a revolt within. She would better agree to terms!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King lay looking at him, like a prisoner on the rack undergoing
+      examination. He did not answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Write thou a letter. Since she loves thee, state thine own case to her.
+      Tell her that I hold thee hostage, and that Khinjan is mine already for a
+      little fighting. In a month she can not pick out my men from among her
+      own. Her position is undermined. Tell her that. Tell her that if she obeys
+      she shall have India and be queen. If she disobeys, she shall die in the
+      Cavern of Earth's Drink!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is a proud woman, mullah,&rdquo; answered King. &ldquo;Threats to such as she--?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The mullah mumbled and strode back and forth three times between King's
+      bed and the fire, with his fists knotted together behind him and his head
+      bent, as Napoleon used to walk. When he stood beside the bed again at last
+      it was with his mind made up, as his clenched fists and his eyes
+      indicated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make thine own terms with her!&rdquo; he growled. &ldquo;Write the letter and send
+      it! I hold thee; she holds Khinjan and the ammunition. I am between her
+      and India. So be it. She shall starve in there! She shall lie in there
+      until the war is over and take what terms are offered her in the end!
+      Write thine own letter! State the case, and bid her answer!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; said King. He began to see now definitely how India was to be
+      saved. It was none of his business to plan yet, but to help others' plans
+      destroy themselves and to sow such seed in the broken ground as might bear
+      fruit in time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mullah left him, to squat and gaze into the fire, and mutter, and King
+      lay still. After a while the mullah went and carried a great water bowl
+      nearer to the fire and, as King had done, stripped himself. Then he heaped
+      great fagots on the fire--wasteful fagots, each of which had cost
+      some woman hours of mountain climbing. And in the glow of the leaping
+      flame he scrubbed himself from head to foot with King's soap. Finally,
+      with a feat of strength that nearly forced an exclamation out of King, he
+      lifted the great water bowl in both hands and emptied the whole contents
+      over himself. Then he resumed his smelly garments without troubling to dry
+      his body, and got out a Quran from a corner and began to read it in a
+      nasal singsong that would have kept dead men awake. King lay and watched
+      and listened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reading scripture only seemed to fire the mullah's veins. For him sleep
+      was either out of reach or despicable, perhaps both. He seemed in a mood
+      to despise anything but conquest and strode back and forth up and down the
+      cave like a caged bear, muttering to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a time he went to the mouth of the cave, to stand and stare out at
+      the camp where the thousand fires were dying fitfully and wood smoke
+      purged the air of human nastiness. The stars looked down on him, and he
+      seemed to try to read them, standing with fists knotted together at his
+      back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as he stood so, six other mullahs came to him and began to argue with
+      him in low tones, he browbeating them all with furious words hissed
+      between half-closed teeth. They were whispering still when King fell
+      asleep. It was courage, not carelessness, that let him sleep--courage
+      and a great hope born of the mullah's perplexity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He dreamed that he was writing, writing, writing, while the torturers made
+      a hot fire ready in the Cavern of Earth's Drink and whetted knives on the
+      bridge end while the organ played The Marseillaise. He dreamed Yasmini
+      came to him and whispered the solution to it all, but what she whispered
+      he could not catch, although she whispered the same words again and again
+      and seemed to be angry with him for not listening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when he awoke at last he had fragments of his blanket in either hand,
+      and the sun was already shining into the jaws of the cave. The camp was
+      alive and reeked of cooking food. But the mullah was gone, and so was all
+      the money the women had brought, together with his medicines and things
+      from Khinjan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter XVII
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     When the last evil jest has been made, and the rest
+     Of the ink of hypocrisy spilt,
+     When the awfully right have elected to fight
+     Lest their own should discover their guilt;
+     When the door has been shut on the &ldquo;if&rdquo; and the &ldquo;but&rdquo;
+      And it's up to the men with the guns,
+     On their knees in that day let diplomatists pray
+     For forgiveness from prodigal sons.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Instead of the mullah, growling texts out of a Quran on his lap, the
+      Orakzai Pathan sat and sunned himself in the cave mouth, emitting
+      worldlier wisdom unadulterated with divinity. As King went toward him to
+      see to whom he spoke he grinned and pointed with his thumb, and King
+      looked down on some sick and wounded men who sat in a crowd together on
+      the ramp, ten feet or so below the cave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They seemed stout soldierly fellows. Men of another type were being kept
+      at a distance by dint of argument and threats. Away in the distance was
+      Muhammad Anim with his broad back turned to the cave, in altercation with
+      a dozen other mullahs. For the time he was out of the reckoning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some of these are wounded,&rdquo; the Pathan explained. &ldquo;Some have sores. Some
+      have the belly ache. Then again, some are sick of words, hot and cold by
+      day and night. All have served in the army. All have medals. All are
+      deserters, some for one reason, some for another and some for no reason at
+      all. Bull-with-a-beard looks the other way. Speak thou to them about the
+      pardon that is offered!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So King went down among them, taking some of the tools of his supposed
+      trade with him and trying to crowd down the triumph that would well up.
+      The seed he had sown had multiplied by fifty in a night. He wanted to
+      shout, as men once did before the walls of Jericho.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A man bared a sword cut. He bent over him, and if the mullah had turned to
+      look there would have been no ground for suspicion. So in a voice just
+      loud enough to reach them all, he repeated what he had told the Pathan the
+      day before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But who art thou?&rdquo; asked one of them suspiciously. Perhaps there had been
+      a shade too much cocksureness in the hakim's voice, but he acted
+      faultlessly when he answered. Voice, accent, mannerism, guilty pride, were
+      each perfect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Political offender. My brother yonder in the cave mouth&rdquo;--(The
+      Pathan smirked. He liked the imputation)--&ldquo;suggested I seek pardon,
+      too. He thinks if I persuade many to apply for pardon then the sirkar may
+      forgive me for service rendered.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pathan's smirk grew to a grin. He liked grandly to have the notion
+      fathered on himself; and his complacency of course was suggestive of the
+      hakim's trustworthiness. But the East is ever cautious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some say thou art a very great liar,&rdquo; remarked a man with half a nose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay,&rdquo; answered King. &ldquo;Liar I may be, but I am one against many. Which of
+      you would dare stand alone and lie to all the others? Nay, sahibs, I am a
+      political offender, not a soldier!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They all laughed at that and seizing the moment when they were in a pliant
+      mood the Orakzai Pathan proceeded to bring proposals to a head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are we agreed?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;Or have we waggled our beards all night long
+      in vain? Take him with us, say I. Then, if pardons are refused us he at
+      least will gain nothing by it. We can plunge our knives in him first,
+      whatever else happens.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was reasonable and they approved in chorus. Possibility of pardon and
+      reinstatement, though only heard of at second hand, had brought unity into
+      being. And unity brought eagerness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us start to-night!&rdquo; urged one man, and nobody hung back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye! Aye! Aye!&rdquo; they chorused. And eagerness, as always in the &ldquo;Hills,&rdquo;
+       brought wilder counsel in its wake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who dare stab Bull-with-a-beard? He has sought blood and has let blood.
+      Let him drink his own.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay! He is too well guarded.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not he!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us stab him and take his head with us; there well may be a price on
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They took a vote on it and were agreed; but that did not suit King at all,
+      whatever Muhammad Anim's personal deserts might be. To let him be stabbed
+      would be to leave Yasmini without a check on her of any kind, and then
+      might India defend herself! Yet to leave the mullah and Yasmini both at
+      large would be almost equally dangerous, for they might form an alliance.
+      There must be some other way, and he set out to gain time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, nay, sahibs!&rdquo; he urged. &ldquo;Nay, nay!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sahibs, I have wife and children in Lahore. Same are most dear to me and
+      I to them. I find it expedient to make great effort for my pardon. Ye are
+      but fifty. Ye are less than fifty. Nay, let us gather a hundred men.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who shall find a hundred?&rdquo; somebody demanded, and there was a chorus of
+      denial. &ldquo;We be all in this camp who ate the salt.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was plain, though, that his daring to hold out only gave them the more
+      confidence in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But Khinjan,&rdquo; he objected. The crimes of the Khinjan men were not to the
+      point. Time had to be gained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye,&rdquo; they agreed. &ldquo;There be many in Khinjan!&rdquo; Mere mention of the place
+      made them regard Orakzai Pathan and hakim with new respect, as having
+      right of entry through the forbidden gate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I have it!&rdquo; the Pathan announced at once, for he was awake to
+      opportunity. &ldquo;Many of you can hardly march. Rest ye here and let the hakim
+      treat your belly aches. Bull-with-a-beard bade me wait here for a letter
+      that must go to Khinjan to-day. Good. I will take his letter. And in
+      Khinjan I will spread news about pardons. It is likely there are fifty
+      there who will dare follow me back, and then we shall march down the
+      Khyber like a full company of the old days! Who says that is not a good
+      plan?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There were several who said it was not, but they happened to have nothing
+      the matter with them and could have marched at once. The rest were of the
+      other way of thinking and agreed in asserting that Khinjan men were a
+      higher caste of extra-ultra murderers whose presence doubtless would bring
+      good luck to the venture. These prevailed after considerable argument.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Strangely enough, none of them deemed the proposition beneath Khinjan
+      men's consideration. Pardon and leave to march again behind British
+      officers loomed bigger in their eyes than the green banner of the Prophet,
+      which could only lead to more outrageous outlawry. They knew Khinjan men
+      were flesh and blood--humans with hearts--as well as they. But
+      caution had a voice yet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She will catch thee in Khinjan Caves,&rdquo; suggested the man with part of his
+      nose missing. &ldquo;She will have thee flayed alive!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take note then, I bequeath all the women in the world to thee! Be thou
+      heir to my whole nose, too, and a blessing!&rdquo; laughed the Pathan, and the
+      butt of the jest spat savagely. In the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; there is only one
+      explanation given as to how one lost his nose, and they all laughed like
+      hyenas until the mullah Muhammad Anim came rolling and striding back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By that time King had got busy with his lancet, but the mullah called him
+      off and drove the crowd away to a distance; then he drove King into the
+      cave in front of him, his mouth working as if he were biting bits of
+      vengeance off for future use.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Write thy letter, thou! Write thy letter! Here is paper. There is a pen--take
+      it! Sit! Yonder is ink--ttutt--ttutt!--Write, now, write!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King sat at a box and waited, as if to take dictation, but the mullah,
+      tugging at his beard, grew furious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Write thine own letter! Invent thine own argument! Persuade her, or die
+      in a new way! I will invent a new way for thee!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So King began to write, in Urdu, for reasons of his own. He had spoken
+      once or twice in Urdu to the mullah and had received no answer. At the end
+      of ten minutes he handed up what he had written, and Muhammad Anim made as
+      if to read it, trying to seem deliberate, and contriving to look
+      irresolute. It was a fair guess that he hated to admit ignorance of the
+      scholars' language.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are there any alterations you suggest?&rdquo; King asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, what care I what the words are? If she be not persuaded, the worse
+      for thee!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He held it out, and as he took it King contrived to tear it; he also
+      contrived to seem ashamed of his own clumsiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will copy it out again,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mullah swore at him, and conceiving that some extra show of authority
+      was needful, growled out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Remember all I said. Set down she must surrender Khinjan Caves or I swear
+      by Allah I will have thee tortured with fire and thorns--and her,
+      too, when the time comes!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now he had said that, or something very like it, in the first letter.
+      There was no doubt left that the Mullah was trying to hide ignorance, as
+      men of that fanatic ambitious mold so often will at the expense of better
+      judgment. If fanatics were all-wise, it would be a poor world for the
+      rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; King said quietly. And with great pretense of copying the
+      other letter out on fresh paper he now wrote what he wished to say, taking
+      so long about it (for he had to weigh each word), that the mullah strode
+      up and down the cave swearing and kicking things over.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;Greeting,&rdquo;' he wrote, &ldquo;to the most beautiful and very
+        wise Princess Yasmini, in her palace in the Caves in
+        Khinjan, from her servant Kurram Khan the hakim, in
+        the camp of the mullah Muhammad Anim, a night's march
+        distant in the hills.
+
+        &ldquo;The mullah Muhammad Anim makes his stand and demands
+        now surrender to himself of Khinjan Caves; and of all
+        his ammunition.  Further, he demands full control of
+        you and of me and of all your men.  He is ready to
+        fight for his demands and already--as you must well
+        know--he has considerable following in Khinjan Caves.
+        He has at least as many men as you have, and he has
+        four thousand more here.
+
+        &ldquo;He threatens as a preliminary to blockade Khinjan
+        Caves, unless the answer to this prove favorable,
+        letting none enter, but calling his own men out to
+        join him.  This would suit the Indian government,
+        because while the 'Hills' fight among themselves
+        they can not raid India, and while he blockades
+        Khinjan Caves there will be time to move against him.
+
+        &ldquo;Knowing that he dares begin and can accomplish what
+        he threatens, I am sorry;  because I know it is said
+        how many services you have rendered of old to the
+        government I serve.  We who serve one raj are One--one
+        to remember--one to forget--one to help each other in
+        good time.
+
+        &ldquo;I have not been idle.  Some of Muhammad Anim's men
+        are already mine.  With them I can return to India,
+        taking information with me that will serve my government.
+        My men are eager to be off.
+
+        &ldquo;It may be that vengeance against me would seem sweeter
+        to you than return to your former allegiance.  In that
+        case, Princess, you only need betray me to the mullah,
+        and be sure my death would leave nothing to be desired
+        by the spectators.  At present he does not suspect me.
+
+        &ldquo;Be assured, however, that not to betray me to him is
+        to leave me free to serve my government and well able
+        to do so.
+
+        &ldquo;I invite you to return to India with me, bearing news
+        that the mullah Muhammad Anim and his men are bottled
+        in Khinjan Caves, and to plan with me to that end.
+
+        &ldquo;If you will, then write an answer to Muhammad Anim,
+        not in Urdu, but in a language he can understand;  seem
+        to surrender to him.  But to me send a verbal message,
+        either by the bearer of this or by some trustier messenger.
+
+        &ldquo;India can profit yet by your service if you will.  And
+        in that case I pledge my word to direct the government's
+        attention only to your good service in the matter.  It is
+        not yet too late to choose.  It is not impertinent in me
+        to urge you.
+
+        &ldquo;Nor can I say how gladly I would subscribe myself your
+        grateful and loyal servant.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The mullah pounced on the finished letter, pretended to read it, and
+      watched him seal it up, smudging the hot wax with his own great gnarled
+      thumb. Then he shouted for the Orakzai Pathan, who came striding in, all
+      grins and swagger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There--take it! Make speed!&rdquo; he ordered, and with his rifle at the
+      &ldquo;ready&rdquo; and the letter tucked inside his shirt, the Pathan favored King
+      with a farewell grin and obeyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get out!&rdquo; the mullah snarled then immediately. &ldquo;See to the sick. Tell
+      them I sent thee. Bid them be grateful!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King went. He recognized the almost madness that constituted the mullah's
+      driving power. It is contagious, that madness, until it destroys itself.
+      It had made several thousand men follow him and believe in him, but it had
+      once given Yasmini a chance to fool him and defeat him, and now it gave
+      King his chance. He let the mullah think himself obeyed implicitly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He became the busiest man in all the &ldquo;Hills.&rdquo; While the mullah glowered
+      over the camp from the cave mouth or fulminated from the Quran or fought
+      with other mullahs with words for weapons and abuse for argument, he
+      bandaged and lanced and poulticed and physicked until his head swam with
+      weariness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sick swarmed so around him that he had to have a body-guard to keep
+      them at bay; so he chose twenty of the least sick from among those who had
+      talked with him after sunrise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And because each of those men had friends, and it is only human to wish
+      one's friend in the same boat, especially when the sea, so to speak, is
+      rough, the progress through the camp became a current of missionary zeal
+      and the virtues of the Anglo-Indian raj were better spoken of than the
+      &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; had heard for years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not that there was any effort made to convert the camp en masse. Far from
+      it. But the likely few were pounced on and were told of a chance to enlist
+      for a bounty in India. And what with winter not so far ahead, and what
+      with experience of former fighting against the British army, the choosing
+      was none so difficult. From the day when the lad first feels soft down
+      upon his face until the old man's beard turns white and his teeth shake
+      out, the Hillman would rather fight than eat; but he prefers to fight on
+      the winning side if he may, and he likes good treatment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before if was dark that night there were thirty men sworn to hold their
+      tongues and to wait for the word to hurry down the Khyber for the purpose
+      of enlisting in some British-Indian regiment. Some even began to urge the
+      hakim not to wait for the Orakzai Pathan, but to start with what he had.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall I leave my brother in the lurch?&rdquo; the hakim asked them; and though
+      they murmured, they thought better of him for it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well for him that he had plenty of Epsom salts in his kit, for in the
+      &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; physic should taste evil and show very quick results to be
+      believed in. He found a dozen diseases of which he did not so much as know
+      the name, but half of the sufferers swore they were cured after the first
+      dose. They would have dubbed him faquir and have foisted him to a pillar
+      of holiness had he cared to let them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Muhammad Anim slept most of the day, like a great animal that scorns to
+      live by rule. But at evening he came to the cave mouth and fulminated such
+      a sermon as set the whole camp to roaring. He showed his power then. The
+      jihad he preached would have tempted dead men from their graves to come
+      and share the plunder, and the curses he called down on cowards and
+      laggards and unbelievers were enough to have frightened the dead away
+      again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In twenty minutes he had undone all King's missionary work. And then in
+      ten more, feeling his power and their response, and being at heart a fool
+      as all rogues are, he built it up again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to make promises too definite. He wanted Khinjan Caves. More, he
+      needed them. So he promised them they should all be free of Khinjan Caves
+      within a day or two, to come and go and live there at their pleasure. He
+      promised them they should leave their wives and children and belongings
+      safe in the Caves while they themselves went down to plunder India. He
+      overlooked the fact that Khinjan Caves for centuries had been a secret to
+      be spoken of in whispers, and that prospect of its violation came to them
+      as a shock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Half of them did not believe him. Such a thing was impossible, and if he
+      were lying as to one point, why not as to all the others, too?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the army veterans, who had been converted by King's talk of pardons,
+      and almost reconverted by the sermon, shook their heads at the talk of
+      taking Khinjan. Why waste time trying to do what never had been done, with
+      her to reckon against, when a place in the sun was waiting for them down
+      in India, to say nothing of the hope of pardons and clean living for a
+      while? They shook their heads and combed their beards and eyed one another
+      sidewise in a way the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night, while the mullah glowered over the camp like a great old owl,
+      with leaping firelight reflected in his eyes, the thousands under the skin
+      tents argued, so that the night was all noise. But King slept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All of another day and part of another night he toiled among the sick,
+      wondering when a message would come back. It was nearly midnight when he
+      bandaged his last patient and came out into the starlight to bend his back
+      straight and yawn and pick his way reeling with weariness back to the
+      mullah's cave. He had given his bag of medicines and implements to a man
+      to carry ahead of him and had gone perhaps ten paces into the dark when a
+      strong hand gripped him by the wrist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hush!&rdquo; said a voice that seemed familiar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned swiftly and looked straight into the eyes of the Rangar Rewa
+      Gunga!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did you get here?&rdquo; he asked in English.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Any fool could learn the password into this camp! Come over here, sahib.
+      I bring word from her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The ground was criss-crossed like a man's palm by the shadows of
+      tent-ropes. The Rangar led him to where the tents were forty feet apart
+      and none was likely to overhear them. There he turned like a flash.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She sends you this!&rdquo; he hissed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In that same instant King was fighting for his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In another second they were down together among the tent-pegs, King
+      holding the Rangar's wrist with both hands and struggling to break it, and
+      the Rangar striving for another stroke. The dagger he held had missed
+      King's ribs by so little that his skin yet tingled from its touch. It was
+      a dagger with bronze blade and a gold hilt--her dagger. It was her
+      perfume in the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They rolled over and over, breathing hard. King wanted to think before he
+      gave an alarm, and he could not think with that scent in his nostrils and
+      creeping into his lungs. Even in the stress of fighting be wondered how
+      the Rangar's clothes and turban had come to be drenched in it. He admitted
+      to himself afterward that it was nothing else than jealousy that suggested
+      to him to make the Rangar prisoner and hand him over to the mullah.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That would have been a ridiculous thing to do, for it would have forced
+      his own betrayal to the mullah. But as if the Rangar had read his mind he
+      suddenly redoubled his efforts and King, weary to the point of sickness,
+      had to redouble his own or die. Perhaps the jealousy helped put venom in
+      his effort, for his strength came back to him as a madman's does. The
+      Rangar gave a moan and let the knife fall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And because jealousy is poison King did the wrong thing then. He pounced
+      on the knife instead of on the Rangar. He could have questioned him--knelt
+      on him and perhaps forced explanations from him. But with a sudden swift
+      effort like a snake's the Rangar freed himself and was up and gone before
+      King could struggle to his feet--gone like a shadow among shadows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King got up and felt himself all over, for they had fought on stony ground
+      and he was bruised. But bruises faded into nothing, and weariness as well,
+      as his mind began to dwell on the new complication to his problem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was plain that the moment he had returned from his message to the
+      Khyber the Rangar had been sent on this new murderous mission. If Yasmini
+      had told the truth a letter had gone into India describing him, King, as a
+      traitor, and from her point of view that might be supposed to cut the very
+      ground away from under his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then why so much trouble to have him killed? Either Rewa Gunga had never
+      taken the first letter, or--and this seemed more probable--Yashiini
+      had never believed the letter would be treated seriously by the
+      authorities, and had only sent it in the hope of fooling him and
+      undermining his determination. In that case, especially supposing her to
+      have received his ultimatum on the mullah's behalf before sending Rewa
+      Gunga with the dagger, she must consider him at least dangerous. Could she
+      be afraid? If so her game was lost already!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps she saw her own peril. Perhaps she contemplated--gosh! what a
+      contingency!--perhaps she contemplated bolting into India with a
+      story of her own, and leaving the mullah to his own devices! In such a
+      case, before going she would very likely try to have the one man stabbed
+      who could give her away most completely. In fact, would she dare escape
+      into India and leave himself alive behind her?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rather thought she would dare do anything. And that thought brought
+      reassurance. She would dare, and being what she was she almost surely
+      would seek vengeance on the mullah before doing anything else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then why the dagger for himself? She must believe him in league with the
+      mullah against her. She might believe that with him out of the way the
+      mullah would prove an easier prey for her. And that belief might be
+      justifiable, but as an explanation it failed to satisfy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an alternative, the very thought of which made him fearfully
+      uneasy, and yet brought a thrill with it. In all eastern lands, love
+      scorned takes to the dagger. He had half believed her when she swore she
+      loved him! The man who could imagine himself loved by Yasmini and not be
+      thrilled to his core would be inhuman, whatever reason and caution and
+      caste and creed might whisper in imagination's wake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reeling from fatigue (he felt like a man who had been racked, for the
+      Rangar's strength was nearly unbelievable), he started toward where the
+      mullah sat glowering in the cave mouth. He found the man who had carried
+      his bag asleep at the foot of the ramp, and taking the bag away from him,
+      let him lie there. And it took him five minutes to drag his hurt weary
+      bones up the ramp, for the fight had taken more out of him than he had
+      guessed at first.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mullah glared at him but let him by without a word. It was by the fire
+      at the back of the cave, where he stooped to dip water from the mullah's
+      enormous crock that the next disturbing factor came to light. He kicked a
+      brand into the fire and the flame leaped. Its light shone on a yard and a
+      half of exquisitely fine hair, like spun gold, that caressed his shoulder
+      and descended down one arm. One thread of hair that conjured up a million
+      thoughts, and in a second upset every argument!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Rewa Gunga had been near enough to her and intimate enough with her not
+      only to become scented with her unmistakable perfume but even to get her
+      hair on his person, then gone was all imagination of her love for himself!
+      Then she had lied from first to last! Then she had tried to make him love
+      her that she might use him, and finding she had failed, she had sent her
+      true love with the dagger to make an end!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a moment he imagined a whole picture, as it might have been in a
+      crystal, of himself trapped and made to don the Roman's armor and forced
+      to pose to the savage 'Hills'--or fooled into posing to them--as
+      her lover, while Rewa Gunga lurked behind the scenes and waited for the
+      harvest in the end. And what kind of harvest?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And what kind of man must Rewa Gunga be who could lightly let go all the
+      prejudices of the East and submit to what only the West has endured
+      hitherto with any complacency--a &ldquo;tertium quid&rdquo;?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet what a fool he, King, had been not to appreciate at once that Rewa
+      Gunga must be her lover. Why should he not be? Were they not alike as
+      cousins? And the East does not love its contrary, but its complement,
+      being older in love than the West, and wiser in its ways in all but the
+      material. He had been blind. He had overlooked the obvious--that from
+      first to last her plan had been to set herself and this Rewa Gunga on the
+      throne of India!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He washed and went through the mummery of muslim prayers for the watchful
+      mullah's sake, and climbed on to his bed. But sleep seemed out of the
+      question. He lay and tossed for an hour, his mind as busy as a terrier in
+      hay. And when he did fall asleep at last it was so to dream and mutter
+      that the mullah came and shook him and preached him a half-hour sermon
+      against the mortal sins that rob men of peaceful slumber by giving them a
+      foretaste of the hell to come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All that seemed kinder and more refreshing than King's own thoughts had
+      been, for when the mullah had done at last and had gone striding back to
+      the cave mouth, he really did fall sound asleep, and it was after dawn
+      when he awoke. The mullah's voice, not untuneful was rousing all the
+      valley echoes in the call to prayer.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        Allah is Almighty!  Allah is Almighty!
+        I declare there is no God but Allah!
+        I declare Muhammad is his prophet!
+        Hie ye to prayer!
+        Hie ye to salvation!
+        Prayer is better than sleep!
+        Prayer is better than sleep!
+        There is no God but Allah!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      And while King knelt behind the mullah and the whole camp faced Mecca in
+      forehead-in-the-dust abasement there came a strange procession down the
+      midst--not strange to the &ldquo;Hills,&rdquo; where such sights are common, but
+      strange to that camp and hour. Somebody rose and struck them, and they
+      knelt like the rest; but when prayer was over and cooking had begun and
+      the camp became a place of savory smell, they came on again--seven
+      blind men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were weary, ragged, lean--seven very tatter-demalions--and
+      the front man led them, tapping the ground with a long stick. The others
+      clung to him in line, one behind the other. He was the only clean-shaven
+      one, and he was the tallest. He looked as if he had not been blind so
+      long, for his physical health was better. All seven men yelled at the
+      utmost of their lungs, but he yelled the loudest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, the hakim--the good hakim!&rdquo; they wailed. &ldquo;Where is the famous
+      hakim? We be blind men--blind we be--blind--blind! Oh, pity
+      us! Is any kismet worse than ours? Oh, show us to the hakim! Show us the
+      way to him! Lead us to him! Oh, the famous, great, good hakim who can heal
+      men's eyes!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The mullah looked down on them like a vulture waiting to see them die, and
+      seeing they did not die, turned his back and went into his cave. Close to
+      the ramp they stopped, and the front man, cocking his head to one side as
+      only birds and the newly blind do, gave voice again in nasal singsong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will none tell me where is the great, good, wise hakim Kurram Khan?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am he,&rdquo; said King, and he stepped down toward him, calling to an
+      assistant to come and bring him water and a sponge. The blind man's face
+      looked strangely familiar, though it was partly disguised by some gummy
+      stuff stuck all about the eyes. Taking it in both hands be tilted the eyes
+      to the light and opened one eye with his thumb. There was nothing whatever
+      the matter with it. He opened the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rub me an ointment on!&rdquo; the man urged him, and he stared at the face
+      again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ismail!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye! Father of cleverness! Make play of healing my eyes!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So King dipped a sponge in water and sent back for his bag and made a
+      great show of rubbing on ointment. In a minute Ismail, looking almost like
+      a young man without his great beard, was dancing like a lunatic with both
+      fists in the air, and yelling as if wasps had stung him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aieee--aieee--aieee!&rdquo; he yelled. &ldquo;I see again! I see! My eyes
+      have light in them! Allah! Oh, Allah heap riches on the great wise hakfim
+      who can heal men's eyes! Allah reward him richly, for I am a beggar and
+      have no goods!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other six blind men came struggling to be next, and while King rubbed
+      ointment on their eyes and saw that there was nothing there he could cure
+      the whole camp began to surge toward him to see the miracle, and his
+      chosen body-guard rushed up to drive them back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Find your way down the Khyber and ask for the Wilayti dakitar. He will
+      finish the cure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The six blind men, half-resentful, half-believing, turned away, mainly
+      because Ismail drove them with words and blows. And as they went a tall
+      Afridi came striding down the camp with a letter for the mullah held out
+      in a cleft stick in front of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her answer!&rdquo; said Ismail with a wicked grin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is her word? Where is the Orakzai Pathan?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Ismail laughed and would not answer him. It seemed to King that he
+      scented climax. So did his near-fifty and their thirty friends. He chose
+      to take the arrival of the blind men as a hint from Providence and to &ldquo;go
+      it blind&rdquo; on the strength of what he had hoped might happen. Also he chose
+      in that instant to force the mullah's hand, on the principle that hurried
+      buffaloes will blunder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To Khinjan!&rdquo; he shouted to the nearest man. &ldquo;The mullah will march on
+      Khinjan!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They murmured and wondered and backed away from him to give him room.
+      Ismail watched him with dropped jaw and wild eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Spread it through the camp that we march on Khinjan! Shout it! Bid them
+      strike the tents!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Somebody behind took up the shout and it went across the camp in leaps, as
+      men toss a ball. There was a surge toward the tents, but King called to
+      his deserters and they clustered back to him. He had to cement their
+      allegiance now or fail altogether, and he would not be able to do it by
+      ordinary argument or by pleading; he had to fire their imagination. And he
+      did.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is on our side!&rdquo; That was a sheer guess. &ldquo;She has kept our man and
+      sent another as hostage for him in token of good faith! Listen! Ye saw
+      this man's eyes healed. Let that be a token! Be ye the men with new eyes!
+      Give it out! Claim the title and be true to it and see me guide you down
+      the Khyber in good time like a regiment, many more than a hundred strong!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They jumped at the idea. The &ldquo;Hills&rdquo;--the whole East, for that matter--are
+      ever ready to form a new sect or join a new band or a new blood-feud.
+      Witness the Nikalseyns, who worship a long-since dead Englishman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We see!&rdquo; yelled one of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We see!&rdquo; they chorused, and the idea took charge. From that minute they
+      were a new band, with a war-cry of their own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To Khinjan!&rdquo; they howled, scattering through the camp, and the mullah
+      came out to glare at them and tug his beard and wonder what possessed
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To Khinjan!&rdquo; they roared at him. &ldquo;Lead us to Khinjan!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To Khinjan, then!&rdquo; he thundered, throwing up both arms in a sort of
+      double apostolic blessing, and then motioning as if he threw them the
+      reins and leave to gallop. They roared back at him like the sea under the
+      whip of a gaining wind. And Ismail disappeared among them, leaving King
+      alone. Then the mullah's eyes fell on King and he beckoned him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King went up with an effort, for he ached yet from his struggle of the
+      night before. Up there by the ashes of the fire the mullah showed him a
+      letter he had crumpled in his fist. There were only a few lines, written
+      in Arabic, which all mullahs are supposed to be able to read, and they
+      were signed with a strange scrawl that might have meant anything. But the
+      paper smelt strongly of her perfume.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, then. Bring all your men, and I will let you and them enter Khinjan
+      Caves. We will strike a bargain in the Cavern of Earth's Drink.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was all, but the fire in the mullah's eyes showed that he thought it
+      was enough. He did not doubt that once he should have his extra four
+      thousand in the caves Khinjan would be his; and he said so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Khinjan is mine!&rdquo; he growled. &ldquo;India is mine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And King did not answer him. He did not believe Yasmini would be fool
+      enough to trust herself in any bargain with Muhammad Anim. Yet he could
+      see no alternative as yet. He could only be still and be glad he had set
+      the camp moving and so had forced the mullah's hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The old fatalist would have suspected her answer otherwise!&rdquo; he told
+      himself, for he knew that he himself suspected it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While he and the mullah watched the tents began to fall and the women
+      labored to roll them. The men began firing their rifles, and within the
+      hour enough ammunition had been squandered to have fought a good-sized
+      skirmish; but the mullah did not mind, for he had Khinjan Caves in view,
+      and none knew better than he what vast store of cartridges and dynamite
+      was piled in there. He let them waste.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Watching his opportunity, King slipped down the ramp and into the crowd,
+      while the mullah was busy with personal belongings in the cave. King left
+      his own belongings to the fates, or to any thief who should care to steal
+      them. He was safe from the mullah in the midst of his nearly eighty men,
+      who half believed him a sending from the skies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We see! we see!&rdquo; they yelled and danced around him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before ever the mullah gave an order they got under way and started
+      climbing the steep valley wall. The mullah on his brown mule thrust
+      forward, trying to get in the lead, and King and his men hung back, to
+      keep at a distance from him. It was when the mullah had reached the top of
+      the slope and was not far from being in the lead that Ismail appeared
+      again, leading King's horse, that he had found in possession of another
+      man. That did not look like enmity or treachery. King mounted and thanked
+      him. Ismail wiped his knife, that had blood on it, and stuck his tongue
+      through his teeth, which did not look quite like treachery either. Yet the
+      Afridi could not be got to say a word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two or three miles along the top of the escarpment the mullah sent back
+      word that he wanted the hakim to be beside him. Doubtless he had looked
+      back and had seen King on the horse, head and shoulders above the baggage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But King's men treated the messenger to open scorn and sent him packing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bid the mullah hunt himself another hakim! Be thou his hakim! Stay, we
+      will give thee a lesson in how to use a knife!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man ran, lest they carry out their threat, for men joke grimly in the
+      &ldquo;Hills.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail came and held King's stirrup, striding beside him with the easy
+      Hillman gait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Art thou my man at last?&rdquo; King asked him, but Ismail laughed and shook
+      his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am her man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is she?&rdquo; King asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, who am I that I should know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But she sent thee?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye, she sent me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To what purpose?&rdquo;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To her purpose!&rdquo; the Afridi answered, and King could not get another word
+      out of him. He fell behind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But out of the corner of his eye, and once or twice by looking back
+      deliberately, King saw that Ismail was taking the members of his new band
+      one by one and whispering to them. What he said was a mystery, but as they
+      talked each man looked at King. And the more they talked the better
+      pleased they seemed. And as the day wore on the more deferential they
+      grew. By midday if King wanted to dismount there were three at least to
+      hold his stirrup and ten to help him mount again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter XVIII
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     By the sweat of your brow;  by the ache of your bones;
+     In the sun, in the wind, in the chill of the rains,
+     Ye sowed as ye knew.  And ye know it was blown
+     To be trodden and burned--aye, and that by your own
+     Who sneered at lean furrows and mocked at the stones.
+     But ye stayed and sowed on.  And a little remains.
+     Ye shall have for your faith.  Ye shall reap for your pains.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Four thousand men with women and children and baggage do not move so
+      swiftly as one man or a dozen, especially in the &ldquo;Hills,&rdquo; where discipline
+      is reckoned beneath a proud man's honor. There were many miles to go
+      before Khinjan when night fell and the mullah bade them camp. He bade them
+      camp because they would have done it otherwise in any case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And we,&rdquo; said King to his all but eighty who crowded around him, &ldquo;being
+      men with new eyes and with a great new hope in us, will halt here and eat
+      the evening meal and watch for an opportunity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Opportunity for what?&rdquo; they asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An opportunity to show how Allah loves the brave!&rdquo; said King, and they
+      had to be content with that, for he would say no more to them. Seeing he
+      would not talk, they made their little fires all around him and watched
+      while their women cooked the food. The mullah would not let them eat until
+      he and the whole camp had prayed like the only righteous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the evening meal was eaten, and sentries had been set at every
+      vantage point, and the men all sat about cleansing their beards and
+      fingers the mullah sent for the hakim again. Only this time he sent twenty
+      men to fetch him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was so nearly a fight that the skin all down King's back was
+      gooseflesh, for a fight at that juncture would have ruined everything. At
+      the least he would have been made a hopeless helpless prisoner. But in the
+      end the mullah's men drew off snarling, and before they could have time to
+      receive new orders or reinforcements, King's die was cast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There came another order from the mullah. The women and children were to
+      be left in camp next dawn, and to remain there until sent for. There was
+      murmuring at that around the camp, and especially among King's contingent.
+      But King laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is good!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why? How so?&rdquo; they asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bid your women make for the Khyber soon after the mullah marches
+      tomorrow. Bid them travel down the Khyber until we and they meet!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But--&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please yourselves, sahibs!&rdquo; The hakim's air was one of supremest
+      indifference. &ldquo;As for me, I leave no women behind me in the mountains. I
+      am content.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They murmured a while, but they gave the orders to their women, and King
+      watched the women nod. And all that while Ismail watched him with
+      carefully disguised concern, but undisguised interest. And King
+      understood. Enlightenment comes to a man swiftly, when it does come, as a
+      rule.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He recalled that Yasmini had not done much to make his first entry into
+      Khinjan easy. On the contrary, she had put him on his mettle and had set
+      Rewa Gunga to the task of frightening him and had tested him and tried him
+      before tempting him at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She must be watching him now, for even the East repeats itself. She had
+      sent Ismail for that purpose. It might be Ismail's business to drive a
+      knife in him at the first opportunity, but he doubted that. It was much
+      more likely that, having failed in an attempt to have him murdered, she
+      was superstitiously remorseful. Her course would depend on his. If he
+      failed, she was done with him. If he succeeded in establishing a strong
+      position of his own, she would yield.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All of which did not explain Ismail's whisperings and noddings and chin
+      strokings with King's contingent. But it explained enough for King's
+      present purpose, and he wasted no time on riders to the problem. With or
+      without Ismail's aid, with or without his enmity, he must control his
+      eighty men and give the slip to the mullah, and he went at once about the
+      best way to do both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will go now,&rdquo; he said quietly. &ldquo;That sentry in yonder shadow has his
+      back turned. He has over-eaten. We will rush him and put good running
+      between us and the mullah.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Surprised into obedience, and too delighted at the prospect of action to
+      wonder why they should obey a hakim so, they slung on their bandoliers and
+      made ready. Ismail brought up King's horse and he mounted. And then at
+      King's word all eighty made a sudden swoop on the drowsy sentry and took
+      him unawares. They tossed him over the cliff, too startled to scream an
+      alarm; and though sentries on either hand heard them and shouted, they
+      were gone into outer darkness like wind-blown ghosts of dead men before
+      the mullah even knew what was happening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They did not halt until not one of them could run another yard, King
+      trusting to his horse to find a footing along the cliff-tops, and to the
+      men to find the way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whither?&rdquo; one whispered to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To Khinjan!&rdquo; he answered; and that was enough. Each whispered to the
+      other, and they all became fired with curiosity more potent than money
+      bribes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he halted at last and dismounted and sat down and the stragglers
+      caught up, panting, they held a council of war all together, with Ismail
+      sitting at King's back and leaning a chin on his shoulder in order to hear
+      better. Bone pressed on bone, and the place grew numb; King shook him off
+      a dozen times; but each time Ismail set his chin back on the same spot, as
+      a dog will that listens to his master. Yet he insisted he was her man, and
+      not King's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, ye men of the Hills,&rdquo; said King, &ldquo;listen to me who am
+      political-offender-with-reward-for-capture-offered!&rdquo; That was a gem of a
+      title. It fired their imaginations. &ldquo;I know things that no soldier would
+      find out in a thousand years, and I will tell you some of what I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now he had to be careful. If he were to invent too much they might
+      denounce him as a traitor to the &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; in general. If he were to tell
+      them too little they would lose interest and might very well desert him at
+      the first pinch. He must feel for the middle way and upset no prejudices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has discovered that this mullah Muhammad Anim is no true muslim, but
+      an unbelieving dog of a foreigner from Farangistan! She has discovered
+      that he plans to make himself an emperor in these Hills, and to sell
+      Hillmen into slavery!&rdquo; Might as well serve the mullah up hot while about
+      it! Beyond any doubt not much more than a mile away the mullah was getting
+      even by condemning the lot of them to death. &ldquo;An eye for the risk of an
+      eye!&rdquo; say the unforgiving Hills.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If one of us should go back into his camp now he would be tortured. Be
+      sure of that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Breathing deeply in the darkness, they nodded, as if the dark had eyes.
+      Ismail's chin drove a fraction deeper into his shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now ye know--for all men know--that the entrance into Khinjan
+      Caves is free to any man who can tell a lie without flinching. It is the
+      way out again that is not free. How many men do ye know that have entered
+      and never returned?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They all nodded again. It was common knowledge that Khinjan was a very
+      graveyard of the presumptuous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has set a trap for the mullah. She will let him and all his men enter
+      and will never let them out again!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How knowest thou?&rdquo; This from two men, one on either hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was I never in Khinjan Caves?&rdquo; he retorted. &ldquo;Whence came I? I am her man,
+      sent to help trap the mullah! I would have trapped all you, but for being
+      weary of these 'Hills' and wishful to go back to India and be pardoned!
+      That is who I am! That is how I know!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Their breath came and went sibilantly, and the darkness was alive with the
+      excitement they thought themselves too warrior-like to utter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what will she do then?&rdquo; asked somebody.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King searched his memory, and in a moment there came back to him a picture
+      of the hurrying jezailchi he had held up in the Khyber Pass, and
+      recollection of the man's words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Know ye not,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that long ago she gave leave to all who ate the
+      salt to be true to the salt? She gave the Khyber jezailchis leave to fight
+      against her. Be sure, whatever she does, she will stand between no man and
+      his pardon!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But will she lead a jihad? We will not fight against her!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay,&rdquo; said King, drawing his breath in. Ismail's chin felt like a knife
+      against his collar bone, and Ismail's iron fingers clutched his arm. It
+      was time to give his hostage to dame Fortune. &ldquo;She will go down into India
+      and use her influence in the matter of the pardons!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe thou art a very great liar indeed!&rdquo; said the man who lacked
+      part of his nose. &ldquo;The Pathan went, and he did not come back. What proof
+      have we.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ye have me!&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;If I show you no proof, how can I escape you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They all grunted agreement as to that. King used his elbow to hit Ismail
+      in the ribs. He did not dare speak to him; but now was the time for Ismail
+      to carry information to her, supposing that to be his job. And after a
+      minute Ismail rolled into a shadow and was gone. King gave him twenty
+      minutes start, letting his men rest their legs and exercise their tongues.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that he was out of the mullah's clutches--and he suspected
+      Yasmini would know of it within an hour or two, and before dawn in any
+      event--he began to feel like a player in a game of chess who foresees
+      his opponent mate in so many moves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Yasmini were to let the mullah and his men into the Caves and to join
+      forces with him in there, he would at least have time to hurry back to
+      India with his eighty men and give warning. He might have time to call up
+      the Khyber jezailchis and blockade the Caves before the hive could swarm,
+      and he chuckled to think of the hope of that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other hand, if there was to be a battle royal between Yasmini and
+      the mullah he would be there to watch it and to comfort India with the
+      news.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now we will go on again, in order to be close to Khinjan at break of
+      day,&rdquo; he said, and they all got up and obeyed him as if his word had been
+      law to them for years. Of all of them he was the only man in doubt--he
+      who seemed most confident of all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They swung along into the darkness under low-hung stars, trailing behind
+      King's horse, with only half a dozen of them a hundred yards or so ahead
+      as an advance guard, and all of them expecting to see Khinjan loom above
+      each next valley, for distances and darkness are deceptive in the &ldquo;Hills,&rdquo;
+       even to trained eyes. Suddenly the advance guard halted, but did not
+      shoot. And as King caught up with them he saw they were talking with some
+      one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had to ride up close before he recognized the Orakzai Pathan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Salaam!&rdquo; said the fellow with a grin. &ldquo;I bring one hundred and eleven!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As he spoke graveyard shadows rose out of the darkness all around and
+      leaned on rifles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be ye men all ex-soldiers of the raj?&rdquo; King asked them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo; they growled in chorus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What will ye?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardons!&rdquo; They all said the word together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who gave you leave to come?&rdquo; King asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None! He told us of the pardons and we came!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo; said the Orakzai Pathan, drawing King aside. &ldquo;But she gave me leave
+      to seek them out and tempt them!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what does she intend?&rdquo; King asked him suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She? Ask Allah, who put the spirit in her! How should I know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will march again, my brothers!&rdquo; King shouted, and they streamed along
+      behind him, now with no advance guard, but with the Orakzai Pathan
+      striding beside King's horse, with a great hand on the saddle. Like the
+      others, he seemed decided in his mind that the hakim ought not to be
+      allowed much chance to escape.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just as the dawn was tinting the surrounding peaks with softest rose they
+      topped a ridge, and Khinjan lay below them across the mile-wide bone-dry
+      valley. They all stood and stared at it, leaning on their guns. All the
+      &ldquo;Men with New Eyes&rdquo; saw it now for the first time, and it held them
+      speechless, for with its patchwork towers and high battlements it looked
+      like a very city of the spirits that their tales around the fire on winter
+      nights so linger on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And while they watched, and the Khinjan men were beginning to murmur (for
+      they needed no last view of the place to satisfy any longings!) none else
+      than Ismail rose from behind a rock and came to King's stirrup. He tugged
+      and King backed his horse until they stood together apart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She sends this message,&rdquo; said Ismail, showing his teeth in the most
+      peculiar grin that surely the Hills ever witnessed. And then, omitting the
+      message, he proceeded first to give some news. &ldquo;Many of her men who have
+      never been in the army, are none the less true to her, and she will not
+      leave them to the mullah's mercy. They will leave the Caves in a little
+      while and will come up here. They are to go down into India and be made
+      prisoners if the sirkar will not enlist them. You are to wait for them
+      here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that all her message?&rdquo; King asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay. That is none of it! This is her message. THOU SHALT KNOW THIS DAY,
+      THOU ENGLISHMAN, WHETHER OR NOT SHE TRULY LOVED THEE! THERE SHALL BE
+      PROOF, SUCH AS EVEN THOU SHALT UNDERSTAND!&rdquo;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What does that mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, who am I that I should know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail slipped away and lost himself among the men, and none of them
+      seemed to notice that he had been away and had come again. On King's
+      advice a dozen men climbed near-by eminences and began to watch for the
+      mullah's coming. The Khinjan men murmured openly; they wanted to be off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But no,&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;Go if ye will, but she has sent word that other men
+      are coming. I wait for them here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a great deal of resentful argument they consented to lie hidden for
+      an hour or two &ldquo;but no longer,&rdquo; and King hid his horse in a hollow and
+      persuaded three of them to gather grass for him. It was a little more than
+      an hour after dawn and the chilled rocks were beginning to grow warmer
+      when the head of a procession came out of Khinjan Gate and started toward
+      them over the valley. In all more than five hundred men emerged and about
+      a hundred women and children, and King's men were kept busy for half an
+      hour counting them and quarreling about the exact number. Some of them
+      were burdened heavily, and there was much discussion as to whether to loot
+      them or not. Then:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Muhammad Anim comes!&rdquo; shouted a voice from a crag top.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They snuggled into better hiding, and there was no thought now of leaving
+      before the mullah should go by. There began to be wagers as to whether her
+      men would be hidden out of sight before the mullah could top the rise; and
+      then, when the last man was safe across the valley and up the cliff and in
+      hiding, there was endless argument as to how much each had betted and to
+      whom he had lost. It needed an effort to quiet them when the mullah rose
+      into view at last above the rise and paused for a minute to stare across
+      at Khinjan before leading his four thousand down and onward. He was silent
+      as an image, but his men roared like a river in flood and he made no
+      effort to check them. He was like a man who has made up his mind to
+      victory in any event. He seemed to be speculating three or four moves
+      ahead of this one, and to hold this one such a foregone conclusion in his
+      mind that it had ceased to interest. He was admirable, there was no doubt
+      of that. In his own way, like an old boar sniffing up the wind for
+      trouble, he could command a decent man's respect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He dismounted, for he had to, and tossed his reins to the nearest man with
+      the air of an emperor. And he led the way dawn the cliffside without
+      hesitation, striding like a mountaineer. His men followed him noisily,
+      holding hands to make human chains at the difficult places and shouting a
+      great deal; but not quite naturally now. They were too impressed by the
+      seriousness of what they undertook, and in their hearts too much afraid.
+      The noise was bravado.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a weary long wait, watching from the crevices until the last man's
+      back departed down the cliff, and the procession--Pied Piper of
+      Hamelin and rats, (but no music!)--wound across the valley. At last
+      Khinjan Gate opened and the mullah led in. The gate did not shut after the
+      last man, King noted that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us go now!&rdquo; shouted fifty voices, and every man of King's party
+      showed himself and stretched. &ldquo;Let us go! Why wait?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But King would not go. Nor would he explain why he would not go. Nor could
+      he tell himself what held him, gazing at Khinjan, except that he thought
+      of Yasmini and ached to know what she was doing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was thirty minutes after the last of the mullahs men had vanished
+      through the gate, and his own men in dozens and twenties were scattered
+      along the cliff-top arguing against delay with growing rancor, when a lone
+      horseman galloped out of Khinjan Gate and started across the valley. He
+      rode recklessly. He was either panic-stricken or else bolder than the
+      devil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a minute King had recognized the mare, and so had the eyes of fifty men
+      around him. No man with half an eye for a horse could have failed to
+      recognize that black mare, having ever seen her once. She came like a goat
+      among the rocks, just as she had once dived into darkness in the Khyber
+      with King following. In another two minutes King had recognized the
+      Rangar's silken turban. And now there was no need to restrain the men;
+      they all stood and watched, to know what new turn affairs were taking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Most of them were staring downward at the Rangar's head as he urged the
+      mare up the cliff path, when the explanation of Yasmini's message came. It
+      was only King, urged by some intuition, who had his eyes fixed on Khinjan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There came a shock that actually swayed the hill they stood on. The mare
+      on the path below missed her footing and fell a dozen feet, only to get up
+      again and scramble as if a thousand devils were behind her, the Rangar
+      riding her grimly, like a jockey in a race. Three more shocks followed. A
+      great slice of Khinjan suddenly caved in with a roar, and smoke and dust
+      burst upward through the tumbling crust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a pause after that, as if the waiting elements were gathering
+      strength. For ten minutes they watched and scarcely breathed. Rewa Gunga
+      gained the summit and, dismounting, stood by King with the reins over his
+      arm. The mare was too blown to do anything but stand and tremble. And King
+      was too enthralled to do anything but stare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is what a woman can do for a man!&rdquo; said Rewa Gunga grimly. &ldquo;She set
+      a fuse and exploded all the dynamite. There were tons of it! The galleries
+      must have fallen in, one on the other! A thousand men digging for a
+      thousand years could never get into Khinjan now, and the only way out is
+      down Earth's Drink! She bade me come and bid you good-by, sahib. I would
+      have stayed in there, but she commanded me. She said, 'Tell King sahib my
+      love was true. Tell him I give him India and all Asia that were at my
+      mercy!'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While the Rangar spoke there came three more earth tremors in swift
+      succession, and a thunder out of Khinjan as if the very &ldquo;Hills&rdquo; were
+      coming to an end. The mare grew frantic and the Rangar summoned six men to
+      hold her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly, right over the top of Khinjan's upper rim, where only the eagles
+      ever perched, there burst a column of water, immeasurable, huge, that for
+      a moment blotted out the sun. It rose sheer upward, curved on itself, and
+      fell in a million-ton deluge on to Khinjan and into Khinjan valley,
+      hissing and roaring and thundering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Earth's Drink had been blocked by the explosion and had found a new way
+      over the barrier before plunging down again into the bowels of the world.
+      The one sky-flung leap it made as its weight burst down a mountain wall
+      was enough to blot out Khinjan forever, and what had been a dry mile-wide
+      moat was a shallow lake with death's rack and rubbish floating on the
+      surface.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The earth rocked. The Hillmen prayed, and King stared, trying to memorize
+      all that had been. Suddenly it flashed across his mind that the Rangar who
+      had striven like a fiend to stab him only a matter of hours ago was now
+      standing behind him, within a yard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was up on his feet in a second and faced about. The Rangar laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So ends the 'Heart of the Hills!'&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Think kindly of her, sahib.
+      She thought well enough of you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed again and sprang on the black mare, and before King could speak
+      or raise a hand to stop him he was off, hell-bent-for-leather along the
+      precipice in the direction of the Khyber Pass and India. Two of the men
+      who had come out of Khinjan mounted and spurred after him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King collected his men and the women and children. It was easy, for they
+      were numb from what they had witnessed and dazed by fear. In half an hour
+      he had them mustered and marching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us go back and loot the mullah's camp and take the women!&rdquo; urged a
+      dozen men at least.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go then!&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;Go back! But I go on!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is afraid! The hakim is afraid of what he saw!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King let them think so. He let them think anything they chose, knowing
+      well that what had unnerved him had at least rendered them amenable to
+      leading. They would have no more dared go back without him, and without at
+      least a hundred others, than they would have dared go and hunt in the
+      ruins of Khinjan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even Ismail clang to his stirrup and would not leave him, looking like a
+      fledgling with his beard all new-sprouted on his jaw, and eyes wider than
+      any bird's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why art thou here?&rdquo; King asked him. &ldquo;Had she no true men who would die
+      with her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Afridi scowled, but choked the answer back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Art thou my man now?&rdquo; King asked him. But he shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So they marched without talking over the hideous boulder-strewn range that
+      separates Khinjan from the Khyber, sleeping fitfully whenever King called
+      a halt, and eating almost nothing at all, for only a few of them had
+      thought of bringing food.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They reached the Khyber famished and were fed at Ali Masjid Fort, after
+      King had given a certain password and had whispered to the officer
+      commanding. But he did not change into European clothes yet, and none of
+      his following suspected him of being an Englishman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A Rangar on a black mare has gone down the pass ahead of you in a hurry,&rdquo;
+       they told him at Ali Masjid. &ldquo;He had two men with him and food enough.
+      Only stopped long enough to make his business known.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did he say his business is?&rdquo; asked King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He gave a sign and said a word that satisfied us--on that point!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;Can you signal down the Pass?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Courtenay still at Jamrud?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. In charge there and growing tired of doing nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Signal down and ask him to have that bath ready for me that I spoke
+      about. Good-by.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So he left Ali Masjid at the head of a motley procession that grew noisier
+      and more confident every hour. Ismail still clung to his stirrup, but
+      began to grow more lively and to have a good many orders to fling to the
+      rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mourn like a dog,&rdquo; King told him. &ldquo;Three howls and a whine and a
+      little sulking--and then forgetfulness!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ismail looked nasty at that but did not answer, although he seemed to have
+      a hot word ready. And thenceforward he hung his head more, and at least
+      tried to seem bereaved. But his manner was unconvincing none the less, and
+      King found it food for thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ex-soldiers and would-be soldiers marched in fours behind him, growing
+      hourly more like drilled men, and talking, with each stride that brought
+      them nearer India, more as men do who have an interest in law and order.
+      Behind them tramped the women from Khinjan, carrying their babies and
+      their husbands loads; and behind them again were the other women, who had
+      been told they would be overtaken in the Khyber, but who had actually had
+      to run themselves raw-footed in order to catch up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Down the Khyber have come conquerors, a dozen conquering kings, and as
+      many beaten armies; but surely no stranger host than this ever trudged
+      between the echoing walls. The very eagles screamed at them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as they neared Jamrud Fort the men who sought pardons began to grow
+      sheepish. They began to remember that the hakim might after all be a
+      trickster, and to realize how much too friendly--how almost intimate
+      he had been with the sahibs at Ali Masjid. They began to cluster round him
+      instead of letting him lead, and by the time they met the farthest
+      outposts up the Khyber they were as nervous as raw recruits and ready to
+      turn and bolt at a word--for no one can be more timid than your
+      Hillman when he is not sure of himself, just as no one can be braver when
+      he knows his ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Signals preceded them, and Courtenay himself rode up the Pass to greet
+      them. But of course he was not very cordial to King, considering his
+      disguise; and he chose to keep the Hillmen in doubt yet as to their
+      eventual reception. But one of them, the Orakzai Pathan (for nothing could
+      completely unman him), shouted to know whether it was true that pardons
+      had been offered for deserters, and Courtenay nodded. They were less timid
+      after that. Some of them pulled medals out and pinned them outside their
+      shirts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Jamrud they were given food and their rifles were taken away from them
+      and a guard was set to watch them. But the guard only consisted of two
+      men, both of whom were Pathans, and they assured them that, ridiculous
+      though it sounded, the British were actually willing to forgive their
+      enemies and to pardon all deserters who applied for pardon on condition of
+      good faith in the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night they prayed to Allah like little children lost and found. The
+      women crooned love-songs to their babies over the clear fires and the men
+      talked--and talked--and talked until the stars grew big as moons
+      to weary eyes and they slept at last, to dream of khaki uniforms and
+      karnel sahibs who knew neither fear nor favor and who said things that
+      were so. It is a mad world to the Himalayan Hillman where men in authority
+      tell truth unadorned without shame and without consideration--a mad,
+      mad world, and perhaps too exotic to be wholesome, but pleasant while the
+      dream lasts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Over in the fort Courtenay placed a bath at King's disposal and lent him
+      clean clothes and a razor. But he was not very cordial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me all the war news!&rdquo; said King, splashing in the tub. And Courtenay
+      told him, passing him another cake of soap when the first was finished.
+      After all there was not much to tell--butchery in Belgium--Huns
+      and guns--and the everlastingly glorious stand that saved Paris and
+      France and Europe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;According to the cables our men are going the records one better. I think
+      that's all,&rdquo; said Courtenay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why the stuffiness?&rdquo; asked King. &ldquo;Why am I talked to at the end of a
+      tube, so to speak?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're under arrest!&rdquo; said Courtenay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The deuce I am!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm taking care of you myself to obviate the necessity of putting a
+      sentry on guard over you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good of you, I'm sure. What's it all about?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't mind telling you, but I'd rather you'd wait. The minute you were
+      sighted word was wired down to headquarters, and the general himself will
+      be up here by train any minute.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; said King. &ldquo;Got a cigar? Got a black one? Blacker the
+      better!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was out of his bath and remembered that minute that he had not smoked a
+      cigar since leaving India. Naked, shaved, with some of the stain removed,
+      he did not look like a man in trouble as he filled his lungs with the
+      saltpeterish smoke of a fat Trichinopoli.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then the general came and did not wait for King to get dressed but
+      burst into the bathroom and shook hands with him while he was still naked
+      and asked ten questions (like a gatling gun) while King was getting on his
+      trousers, divining each answer after the third word and waving the rest
+      aside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And why am I arrested, sir?&rdquo; asked King the moment he could slip the
+      question in edgewise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes, of course. Try the case here as well as anywhere. What does this
+      mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of his pocket the general produced a letter that smelt strongly of a
+      scent King recognized. He spread it out on a table, and King read. It was
+      Yasmini's letter that she had sent down the Khyber to make India too hot
+      to hold him.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;Your Captain King has been too much trouble.  He has
+        taken money from the Germans.  He adopted native dress.
+        He called himself Kurram Khan.  He slew his own brother
+        at night in the Khyber Pass.  These men will say that
+        he carried the head to Khinjan, and their word is true.
+        I, Yasmini, saw.  He used the head for a passport to
+        obtain admittance.  He proclaims a jihad!  He urges
+        invasion of India!  He held up his brother's head before
+        five thousand men and boasted of the murder.  The next
+        you shall hear of your Captain King of the Khyber Rifles
+        he will be leading a jihad into India.  You would have
+        better trusted me.  Yasmini.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too bad about your brother,&rdquo; said the general.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The body is buried. How much is true about the head?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King told him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where's she?&rdquo; asked the general.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King did not answer. The general waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ask the Rangar,&rdquo; Courtenay suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is he?&rdquo; asked King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Caught him coming down the Khyber on his black mare and arrested him.
+      He's in the next room! I hope he's to be hanged. So that I can buy the
+      mare,&rdquo; he added cheerfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King whistled softly to himself, and the general looked at him through
+      half-closed eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go in and talk to him, King. Let me know the result.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had picked King to go up the Khyber on that errand not for nothing. He
+      knew King and he knew the symptoms. Without answering him King obeyed. He
+      went out of the room into a dark corridor and rapped on the door of the
+      next room to the right. There was a muffled answer from within. Courtenay
+      shouted something to the sentry outside the door and he called another man
+      who fitted a key in the lock. King walked into a room in which one lamp
+      was burning and the door slammed shut behind him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was in there an hour, and it never did transpire just what passed, for
+      he can hold his tongue on any subject like a clam, and the general, if
+      anything, can go him one better. Courtenay was placed under orders not to
+      talk, so those who say they know exactly what happened in the room between
+      the time when the door was shut on King and the time when he knocked to
+      have it opened and called for the general, are not telling the truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What is known is that finally the general hurried through the door and
+      ejaculated, &ldquo;Well, I'm damned!&rdquo; before it could close again. The sentry
+      (Punjabi Mussulman) has sworn to that over a dozen camp-fires since the
+      day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it is known, too, for the sentry has taken oath on it and has told the
+      story so many times without much variation that no one who knows the man's
+      record doubts any longer--it is known that when the door opened again
+      King and the general walked out, with the Rangar between them. And the
+      Rangar had no turban on, but carried it unwound in his hand. And his
+      golden hair fell nearly to his knees and changed his whole appearance. And
+      he was weeping. And he was not a Rangar at all, but she, and how anybody
+      can ever have mistaken her for a man, even in man's clothes and with her
+      skin darkened, was beyond the sentry's power to guess. He for one, etc....
+      But nobody believed that part of his tale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Yussuf bin Ali said over the camp-fire up the Khyber later on, &ldquo;When
+      she sets out to disguise herself, she is what she will be, and he who says
+      he thinks otherwise has two tongues and no conscience!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      What is surely true is that the four of them--Yasmini, the general,
+      Courtenay and King sat up all night in a room in the fort, talking
+      together, while a succession of sentries overstrained their ears
+      endeavoring to hear through keyholes. And the sentries heard nothing and
+      invented very much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Partan Singh, the Sikh, who carried in bread and cocoa to them at
+      about five the next morning and found them still talking, heard King say,
+      &ldquo;So, in my opinion, sir, there'll be no jihad in these parts. There'll be
+      sporadic raids, of course, but nothing a brigade can't deal with. The
+      heart of the holy war's torn out and thrown away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; said the general. &ldquo;You can get up the Khyber again and join
+      your regiment.&rdquo;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But by that time the Rangar's turban was on again and the tears were dry,
+      and it was Partan Singh who threw most doubt on the sentry's tale about
+      the golden hair. But, as the sentry said, no doubt Partan Singh was
+      jealous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no doubt whatever that the general went back to Peshawur in the
+      train at eight o'clock and that the Rangar went with him in a separate
+      compartment with about a dozen Hillmen chosen from among those who had
+      come down with King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it is certain that before they went King had a talk with the Rangar in
+      a room alone, of which conversation, however, the sentry reported
+      afterward that he did not overhear one word; and he had to go to the
+      doctor with a cold in his ear at that. He said he was nearly sure he heard
+      weeping. But on the other hand, those who saw both of them come out were
+      certain that both were smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is quite certain that Athelstan King went up the Khyber again, for the
+      official records say so, and they never lie, especially in time of war. He
+      rode a coal-black mare, and Courtenay called him &ldquo;Chikki&rdquo;--a
+      &ldquo;lifter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Some say the Rangar went to Delhi. Some say Yasmini is in Delhi. Some say
+      no. But it is quite certain that before he started up the Khyber King
+      showed Courtenay a great gold bracelet that he had under his sleeve. Five
+      men saw him do it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And if that was really Rewa Gunga in the general's train, why was the
+      general so painfully polite to him? And why did Ismail insist on riding in
+      the train, instead of accepting King's offer to go up the Khyber with him?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One thing is very certain. King was right about the jihad. There has been
+      none in spite of all Turkey's and Germany's efforts. There have been
+      sporadic raids, much as usual, but nothing one brigade could not easily
+      deal with, the paid press to the contrary notwithstanding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King of the Khyber Rifles is now a major, for you can see that by turning
+      up the army list.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But if you wish to know just what transpired in the room in Jamrud Fort
+      while the general and Courtenay waited, you must ask King--if you
+      dare; for only he knows, and one other. It is not likely you can find the
+      other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it is likely that you may hear from both of them again, for &ldquo;A woman
+      and intrigue are one!&rdquo; as India says. The war seems long, and the world is
+      large, and the chances for intrigue are almost infinite, given such
+      combination as King and Yasmini and a love affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as King says on occasion: &ldquo;Kuch dar nahin hai! There is no such thing
+      as fear!&rdquo; Another one might say, &ldquo;The roof's the limit!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And bear in mind, for this is important: King wrote to Yasmini a letter,
+      in Urdu from the mullah's cave, in which he as good as gave her his word
+      of honor to be her &ldquo;loyal servant&rdquo; should she choose to return to her
+      allegiance. He is no splitter of hairs, no quibbler. His word is good on
+      the darkest night or wherever he casts a shadow in the sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man and his promise--a woman and intrigue--are one!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The End
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+
+
+
+
+    </div>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's King--of the Khyber Rifles, by Talbot Mundy
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
diff --git a/old/old-2024-02-07/6066.txt b/old/old-2024-02-07/6066.txt
new file mode 100644
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--- /dev/null
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of King--of the Khyber Rifles, by Talbot Mundy
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: King--of the Khyber Rifles
+       A Romance of Adventure
+
+Author: Talbot Mundy
+
+Release Date: July, 2004  [EBook #6066]
+Last Updated: August 16, 2012
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KING--OF THE KHYBER RIFLES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by M.R.J.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+KING--OF THE KHYBER RIFLES
+
+A Romance of Adventure
+
+
+By Talbot Mundy
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+
+     Suckled were we in a school unkind
+     On suddenly snatched deduction
+     And ever ahead of you (never behind!)
+     Over the border our tracks you'll find,
+     Wherever some idiot feels inclined
+     To scatter the seeds of ruction.
+
+     For eyes we be, of Empire, we!
+     Skinned and Puckered and quick to see
+     And nobody guesses how wise we be.
+     Unwilling to advertise we be.
+     But, hot on the trail of ties, we be
+     The pullers of roots of ruction!
+
+     --Son of the Indian Secret Service
+
+
+The men who govern India--more power to them and her!--are few. Those
+who stand in their way and pretend to help them with a flood of words
+are a host. And from the host goes up an endless cry that India is the
+home of thugs, and of three hundred million hungry ones.
+
+The men who know--and Athelstan King might claim to know a
+little--answer that she is the original home of chivalry and the modern
+mistress of as many decent, gallant, native gentlemen as ever graced a
+page of history.
+
+The charge has seen the light in print that India--well-spring of
+plague and sudden death and money-lenders--has sold her soul to twenty
+succeeding conquerors in turn.
+
+Athelstan King and a hundred like him whom India has picked from British
+stock and taught, can answer truly that she has won it back again from
+each by very purity of purpose.
+
+So when the world war broke the world was destined to be surprised on
+India's account. The Red Sea, full of racing transports crowded with
+dark-skinned gentlemen, whose one prayer was that the war might not be
+over before they should have struck a blow for Britain, was the Indian
+army's answer to the press.
+
+The rest of India paid its taxes and contributed and muzzled itself and
+set to work to make supplies. For they understand in India, almost as
+nowhere else, the meaning of such old-fashioned words as gratitude and
+honor; and of such platitudes as, "Give and it shall be given unto you."
+
+More than one nation was deeply shocked by India's answer to "practises"
+that had extended over years. But there were men in India who learned to
+love India long ago with that love that casts out fear, who knew exactly
+what was going to happen and could therefore afford to wait for orders
+instead of running round in rings.
+
+Athelstan King, for instance, nothing yet but a captain unattached, sat
+in meagerly furnished quarters with his heels on a table. He is not a
+doctor, yet he read a book on surgery, and when he went over to the club
+he carried the book under his arm and continued to read it there. He is
+considered a rotten conversationalist, and he did nothing at the club to
+improve his reputation.
+
+"Man alive--get a move on!" gasped a wondering senior, accepting a
+cigar. Nobody knows where he gets those long, strong, black cheroots,
+and nobody ever refuses one.
+
+"Thanks--got a book to read," said King.
+
+"You ass! Wake up and grab the best thing in sight, as a stepping stone
+to something better! Wake up and worry!"
+
+King grinned. You have to when you don't agree with a senior officer,
+for the army is like a school in many more ways than one.
+
+"Help yourself, sir! I'll take the job that's left when the scramble's
+over. Something good's sure to be overlooked."
+
+"White feather? Laziness? Dark Horse?" the major wondered. Then he
+hurried away to write telegrams, because a belief thrives in the early
+days of any war that influence can make or break a man's chances. In
+the other room where the telegraph blanks were littered in confusion
+all about the floor, he ran into a crony whose chief sore point was
+Athelstan King, loathing him as some men loathe pickles or sardines, for
+no real reason whatever, except that they are what they are.
+
+"Saw you talking to King," he said.
+
+"Yes. Can't make him out. Rum fellow!"
+
+"Rum? Huh! Trouble is he's seventh of his family in succession to serve
+in India. She has seeped into him and pickled his heritage. He's a
+believer in Kismet crossed on to Opportunity. Not sure he doesn't pray
+to Allah on the sly! Hopeless case."
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"Quite!"
+
+So they all sent telegrams and forgot King who sat and smoked and read
+about surgery; and before he had nearly finished one box of cheroots
+a general at Peshawur wiped a bald red skull and sent him an urgent
+telegram.
+
+"Come at once!" it said simply.
+
+King was at Lahore, but miles don't matter when the dogs of war are
+loosed. The right man goes to the right place at the exact right time
+then, and the fool goes to the wall. In that one respect war is better
+than some kinds of peace.
+
+In the train on the way to Peshawur he did not talk any more volubly,
+and a fellow traveler, studying him from the opposite corner of the
+stifling compartment, catalogued him as "quite an ordinary man." But he
+was of the Public Works Department, which is sorrowfully underpaid and
+wears emotions on its sleeve for policy's sake, believing of course that
+all the rest of the world should do the same.
+
+"Don't you think we're bound in honor to go to Belgium's aid?" he asked.
+"Can you see any way out of it?"
+
+"Haven't looked for one," said King.
+
+"But don't you think--"
+
+"No," said King. "I hardly ever think. I'm in the army, don't you know,
+and don't have to. What's the use of doing somebody else's work?"
+
+"Rotter!" thought the P.W.D. man, almost aloud; but King was not
+troubled by any further forced conversation. Consequently he reached
+Peshawur comfortable, in spite of the heat. And his genial manner
+of saluting the full-general who met him with a dog-cart at Peshawur
+station was something scandalous.
+
+"Is he a lunatic or a relative or royalty?" the P.W.D. man wondered.
+
+Full-generals, particularly in the early days of war, do not drive
+to the station to meet captains very often; yet King climbed into the
+dog-cart unexcitedly, after keeping the general waiting while he checked
+a trunk!
+
+The general cracked his whip without any other comment than a smile.
+A blood mare tore sparks out of the macadam, and a dusty military road
+began to ribbon out between the wheels. Sentries in unexpected places
+announced themselves with a ring of shaken steel as their rifles came to
+the "present," which courtesies the general noticed with a raised whip.
+Then a fox-terrier resumed his chase of squirrels between the planted
+shade-trees, and Peshawur became normal, shimmering in light and heat
+reflected from the "Hills."
+
+(The P.W.D. man, who would have giggled if a general mentioned him by
+name, walked because no conveyance could be hired. Judgment was in the
+wind.)
+
+On the dog-cart's high front seat, staring straight ahead of him between
+the horse's ears, King listened. The general did nearly all the talking.
+
+"The North's the danger."
+
+King grunted with the lids half-lowered over full dark eyes. He did not
+look especially handsome in that attitude. Some men swear he looks like
+a Roman, and others liken him to a gargoyle, all of them choosing to
+ignore the smile that can transform his whole face instantly.
+
+"We're denuding India of troops--not keeping back more than a mere
+handful to hold the tribes in check."
+
+King nodded. There has never been peace along the northwest border. It
+did not need vision to foresee trouble from that quarter. In fact it
+must have been partly on the strength of some of King's reports that the
+general was planning now.
+
+"That was a very small handful of Sikhs you named as likely to give
+trouble. Did you do that job thoroughly?"
+
+King grunted.
+
+"Well--Delhi's chock-full of spies, all listening to stories made in
+Germany for them to take back to the 'Hills' with 'em. The tribes'll
+know presently how many men we're sending oversea. There've been rumors
+about Khinjan by the hundred lately. They're cooking something. Can you
+imagine 'em keeping quiet now?"
+
+"That depends, sir. Yes, I can imagine it."
+
+The general laughed. "That's why I sent for you. I need a man with
+imagination! There's a woman you've got to work with on this occasion
+who can imagine a shade or two too much. What's worse, she's ambitious.
+So I chose you to work with her."
+
+King's lips stiffened under his mustache, and the corners of his eyes
+wrinkled into crow's-feet to correspond. Eyes are never coal-black, of
+course, but his looked it at that minute.
+
+"You know we've sent men to Khinjan who are said to have entered the
+Caves. Not one of 'em has ever returned."
+
+King frowned.
+
+"She claims she can enter the Caves and come out again at pleasure. She
+has offered to do it, and I have accepted."
+
+It would not have been polite to look incredulous, so King's expression
+changed to one of intense interest a little overdone, as the general did
+not fail to notice.
+
+"If she hadn't given proof of devotion and ability, I'd have turned
+her down. But she has. Only the other day she uncovered a plot in
+Delhi--about a million dynamite bombs in a ruined temple in charge of a
+German agent for use by mutineers supposed to be ready to rise against
+us. Fact! Can you guess who she is?"
+
+"Not Yasmini?" King hazarded, and the general nodded and flicked his
+whip. The horse mistook it for a signal, and it was two minutes before
+the speed was reduced to mere recklessness.
+
+The helmet-strap mark, printed indelibly on King's jaw and cheek by the
+Indian sun, tightened and grew whiter--as the general noted out of the
+corner of his eye.
+
+"Know her?"
+
+"Know of her, of course, sir. Everybody does. Never met her to my
+knowledge."
+
+"Um-m-m! Whose fault was that? Somebody ought to have seen to that. Go
+to Delhi now and meet her. I'll send her a wire to say you're coming.
+She knows I've chosen you. She tried to insist on full discretion, but
+I overruled her. Between us two, she'll have discretion once she gets
+beyond Jamrud. The 'Hills' are full of our spies, of course, but none
+of 'em dare try Khinjan Caves any more and you'll be the only check we
+shall have on her."
+
+King's tongue licked his lips, and his eyes wrinkled. The general's
+voice became the least shade more authoritative.
+
+"When you see her, get a pass from her that'll take you into Khinjan
+Caves! Ask her for it! For the sake of appearances I'll gazette you
+Seconded to the Khyber Rifles. For the sake of success, get a pass from
+her!"
+
+"Very well, sir."
+
+"You've a brother in the Khyber Rifles, haven't you? Was it you or your
+brother who visited Khinjan once and sent in a report?"
+
+"I did, sir."
+
+He spoke without pride. Even the brigade of British-Indian cavalry that
+went to Khinjan on the strength of his report and leveled its defenses
+with the ground, had not been able to find the famous Caves. Yet the
+Caves themselves are a by-word.
+
+"There's talk of a jihad (holy war). There's worse than that! When you
+went to Khinjan, what was your chief object?"
+
+"To find the source of the everlasting rumors about the so-called 'Heart
+of the Hills,' sir."
+
+"Yes, yes. I remember. I read your report. You didn't find anything, did
+you? Well. The story is now that the 'Heart of the Hills' has come to
+life. So the spies say."
+
+King whistled softly.
+
+"There's no guessing what it means," said the general. "Go and find
+out. Go and work with Yasmini. I shall have enough men here to attack
+instantly and smash any small force as soon as it begins to gather
+anywhere near the border. But Khinjan is another story. We can't prove
+anything, but the spies keep bringing in rumors of ten thousand men in
+Khinjan Caves, and of another large lashkar not far away from Khinjan.
+There must be no jihad, King! India is all but defenseless! We can
+tackle sporadic raids. We can even handle an ordinary raid in force. But
+this story about a 'Heart of the Hills' coming to life may presage unity
+of action and a holy war such as the world has not seen. Go up there and
+stop it if you can. At least, let me know the facts."
+
+King grunted. To stop a holy war single-handed would be rather like
+stopping the wind--possibly easy enough, if one knew the way. Yet
+he knew no general would throw away a man like himself on a useless
+venture. He began to look happy.
+
+The general clucked to the mare and the big beast sank an inch between
+the shafts. The sais behind set his feet against the drop-board and
+clung with both hands to the seat. One wheel ceased to touch the gravel
+as they whirled along a semicircular drive. Suddenly the mare drew up
+on her haunches, under the porch of a pretentious residence. Sentries
+saluted. The sais swung down. In less than sixty seconds King was
+following the general through a wide entrance into a crowded hall. The
+instant the general's fat figure darkened the doorway twenty men of
+higher rank than King, native and English, rose from lined-up chairs and
+pressed forward.
+
+"Sorry--have to keep you all waiting--busy!" He waved them aside with a
+little apologetic gesture. "Come in here, King."
+
+King followed him through a door that slammed tight behind them on
+rubber jambs.
+
+"Sit down!"
+
+The general unlocked a steel drawer and began to rummage among the
+papers in it. In a minute he produced a package, bound in rubber bands,
+with a faded photograph face-upward on the top.
+
+"That's the woman! How d'you like the look of her?"
+
+King took the package and for a minute stared hard at the likeness of a
+woman whose fame has traveled up and down India, until her witchery
+has become a proverb. She was dressed as a dancing woman, yet very few
+dancing women could afford to be dressed as she was.
+
+King's service uses whom it may, and he had met and talked with many
+dancing women in the course of duty; but as he stared at Yasmini's
+likeness he did not think he had ever met one who so measured up to
+rumor. The nautch he knew for a delusion. Yet--!
+
+The general watched his face with eyes that missed nothing.
+
+"Remember--I said work with her!"
+
+King looked up and nodded.
+
+"They say she's three parts Russian," said the general. "To my own
+knowledge she speaks Russian like a native, and about twenty other
+tongues as well, including English. She speaks English as well as you or
+I. She was the girl-widow of a rascally Hill-rajah. There's a story I've
+heard, to the effect that Russia arranged her marriage in the day when
+India was Russia's objective--and that's how long ago?--seems like
+weeks, not years! I've heard she loved her rajah. And I've heard she
+didn't! There's another story that she poisoned him. I know she got
+away with his money--and that's proof enough of brains! Some say she's
+a she-devil. I think that's an exaggeration, but bear in mind she's
+dangerous!"
+
+King grinned. A man who trusts Eastern women over readily does not rise
+far in the Secret Service.
+
+"If you've got nous enough to keep on her soft side and use her--not let
+her use you--you can keep the 'Hills' quiet and the Khyber safe! If
+you can contrive that--now--in this pinch--there's no limit for you!
+Commander-in-chief shall be your job before you're sixty!"
+
+King pocketed the photograph and papers. "I'm well enough content, sir,
+as things are," he said quietly.
+
+"Well, remember she's ambitious, even if you're not! I'm not preaching
+ambition, mind--I'm warning you! Ambition's bad! Study those papers on
+your way down to Delhi and see that I get them back."
+
+The general paced once across the room and once back again, with hands
+behind him. Then he stopped in front of King.
+
+"No man in India has a stiffer task than you have now! It may encourage
+you to know that I realize that! She's the key to the puzzle, and she
+happens to be in Delhi. Go to Delhi, then. A jihad launched from the
+'Hills' would mean anarchy in the plains. That would entail sending
+back from France an army that can't be spared. There must be no jihad,
+King!--There must--not--be--one! Keep that in your head!"
+
+"What arrangements have been made with her, sir?"
+
+"Practically none! She's watching the spies in Delhi, but they're likely
+to break for the 'Hills' any minute. Then they'll be arrested. When that
+happens the fate of India may be in your hands and hers! Get out of my
+way now, until tiffin-time!"
+
+In a way that some men never learn, King proceeded to efface himself
+entirely among the crowd in the hall, contriving to say nothing of any
+account to anybody until the great gong boomed and the general led
+them all in to his long dining table. Yet he did not look furtive
+or secretive. Nobody noticed him, and he noticed everybody. There is
+nothing whatever secretive about that.
+
+The fare was plain, and the meal a perfunctory affair. The general and
+his guests were there for other reason than to eat food, and only the
+man who happened to seat himself next to King--a major by the name of
+Hyde--spoke to him at all.
+
+"Why aren't you with your regiment?" he asked.
+
+"Because the general asked me to lunch, sir!"
+
+"I suppose you've been pestering him for an appointment!"
+
+King, with his mouth full of curr did not answer, but his eyes smiled.
+
+"It's astonishing to me," said the major, "that a captain should leave
+his company when war has begun! When I was captain I'd have been driven
+out of the service if I'd asked for leave of absence at such a time!"
+
+King made no comment, but his expression denoted belief.
+
+"Are you bound for the front, sir?" he asked presently. But Hyde did not
+answer. They finished the meal in silence.
+
+After lunch he was closeted with the general again for twenty minutes.
+Then one of the general's carriages took him to the station; and it did
+not appear to trouble him at all that the other occupant of the carriage
+was the self-same Major Hyde who had sat next him at lunch. In fact, he
+smiled so pleasantly that Hyde grew exasperated. Neither of them spoke.
+At the station Hyde lost his temper openly, and King left him abusing an
+unhappy native servant.
+
+The station was crammed to suffocation by a crowd that roared and
+writhed and smelt to high heaven. At one end of the platform, in the
+midst of a human eddy, a frenzied horse resisted with his teeth and all
+four feet at once the efforts of six natives and a British sergeant to
+force him into a loose-box. At the back of the same platform the little
+dark-brown mules of a mountain battery twitched their flanks in line,
+jingling chains and stamping when the flies bit home.
+
+Flies buzzed everywhere. Fat native merchants vied with lean and timid
+ones in noisy effort to secure accommodation on a train already crowded
+to the limit. Twenty British officers hunted up and down for the places
+supposed to have been reserved for them, and sweating servants hurried
+after them with arms full of heterogeneous baggage, swearing at
+the crowd that swore back ungrudgingly. But the general himself had
+telephoned for King's reservation, so he took his time.
+
+There were din and stink and dust beneath a savage sun, shaken into
+reverberations by the scream of an engine's safety valve. It was India
+in essence and awake!--India arising out of lethargy!--India as she is
+more often nowadays--and it made King, for the time being of the Khyber
+Rifles, happier than some other men can be in ballrooms.
+
+Any one who watched him--and there was at least one man who did--must
+have noticed his strange ability, almost like that of water, to reach
+the point he aimed for, through, and not around, the crowd.
+
+He neither shoved nor argued. Orders and blows would have been equally
+useless, for had it tried the crowd could not have obeyed, and it was in
+no mind to try. Without the least apparent effort he arrived--and
+there is no other word that quite describes it--he arrived, through
+the densest part of the sweating throng of humans, at the door of the
+luggage office.
+
+There, though a bunnia's sharp elbow nagged his ribs, and the bunnia's
+servant dropped a heavy package on his foot, he smiled so genially that
+he melted the wrath of the frantic luggage clerk. But not at once. Even
+the sun needs seconds to melt ice.
+
+"Am I God?" the babu wailed. "Can I do all the-e things in all the-e
+world at once if not sooner?"
+
+King's smile began to get its work in. The man ceased gesticulating to
+wipe sweat from his stubbly jowl with the end of a Punjabi headdress. He
+actually smiled back. Who was he, that he should suspect new outrage or
+guess he was about to be used in a game he did not understand? He would
+have stopped all work to beg for extra pay at the merest suggestion of
+such a thing; but as it was he raised both fists and lapsed into his own
+tongue to apostrophize the ruffian who dared jostle King. A Northerner
+who did not seem to understand Punjabi almost cost King his balance as
+he thrust broad shoulders between him and the bunnia.
+
+The bunnia chattered like an outraged ape; but King, the person most
+entitled to be angry, actually apologized! That being a miracle, the
+babu forthwith wrought another one, and within a minute King's one trunk
+was checked through to Delhi.
+
+"Delhi is right, sahib?" he asked, to make doubly sure; for in India
+where the milk of human kindness is not hawked in the market-place, men
+will pay over-measure for a smile.
+
+"Yes. Delhi is right. Thank you, babuji."
+
+He made more room for the Hillman, beaming amusement at the man's
+impatience; but the Hillman had no luggage and turned away, making an
+unexpected effort to hide his face with a turban end. He who had forced
+his way to the front with so much violence and haste now burst back
+again toward the train like a football forward tearing through the thick
+of his opponents. He scattered a swath a yard wide, for he had shoulders
+like a bull. King saw him leap into third-class carriage. He saw, too,
+that he was not wanted in the carriage. There was a storm of protest
+from tight-packed native passengers, but the fellow had his way.
+
+The swath through the crowd closed up like water in a ship's wake, but
+it opened again for King. He smiled so humorously that the angry jostled
+ones smiled too and were appeased, forgetting haste and bruises and
+indignity merely because understanding looked at them through merry
+eyes. All crowds are that way, but an Indian crowd more so than all.
+
+Taking his time, and falling foul of nobody, King marked down a native
+constable--hot and unhappy, leaning with his back against the train. He
+touched him on the shoulder and the fellow jumped.
+
+"Nay, sahib! I am only constabeel--I know nothing--I can do nothing! The
+teerain goes when it goes, and then perhaps we will beat these people
+from the platform and make room again! But there is no authority--no law
+any more--they are all gone mad!"
+
+King wrote on a pad, tore off a sheet, folded it and gave it to him.
+
+"That is for the Superintendent of Police at the office. Carriage number
+1181, eleven doors from here--the one with the shut door and a big
+Hillman inside sitting three places from the door facing the engine.
+Get the Hillman! No, there is only one Hillman in the carriage. No, the
+others are not his friends; they will not help him. He will fight, but
+he has no friends in that carriage."
+
+The "constabeel" obeyed, not very cheerfully. King stood to watch him
+with a foot on the step of a first-class coach. Another constable passed
+him, elbowing a snail's progress between the train and the crowd. He
+seized the man's arm.
+
+"Go and help that man!" he ordered. "Hurry!"
+
+Then he climbed into the carriage and leaned from the window. He grinned
+as he saw both constables pounce on a third-class carriage door and,
+with the yell of good huntsmen who have viewed, seize the protesting
+Northerner by the leg and begin to drag him forth. There was a fight,
+that lasted three minutes, in the course of which a long knife flashed.
+But there were plenty to help take the knife away, and the Hillman stood
+handcuffed and sullen at last, while one of his captors bound a cut
+forearm. Then they dragged him away; but not before he had seen King at
+the window, and had lipped a silent threat.
+
+"I believe you, my son!" King chuckled, half aloud. "I surely believe
+you! I'll watch! Ham dekta hai!"
+
+"Why was that man arrested?" asked an acid voice behind him; and without
+troubling to turn his head, he knew that Major Hyde was to be
+his carriage mate again. To be vindictive, on duty or off it, is
+foolishness; but to let opportunity slip by one is a crime. He looked
+glad, not sorry, as he faced about--pleased, not disappointed--like a
+man on a desert island who has found a tool.
+
+"Why was that man arrested?" the major asked again.
+
+"I ordered it," said King.
+
+"So I imagined. I asked you why."
+
+King stared at him and then turned to watch the prisoner being dragged
+away; he was fighting again, striking at his captors' heads with
+handcuffed wrists.
+
+"Does he look innocent?" asked King.
+
+"Is that your answer?" asked the major. Balked ambition is an ugly horse
+to ride. He had tried for a command but had been shelved.
+
+"I have sufficient authority," said King, unruffled. He spoke as if he
+were thinking of something entirely different. His eyes were as if they
+saw the major from a very long way off and rather approved of him on the
+whole.
+
+"Show me your authority, please!"
+
+King dived into an inner pocket and produced a card that had about ten
+words written on its face, above a general's signature. Hyde read it and
+passed it back.
+
+"So you're one of those, are you!" he said in a tone of voice that would
+start a fight in some parts of the world and in some services. But
+King nodded cheerfully, and that annoyed the major more than ever; he
+snorted, closed his mouth with a snap and turned to rearrange the sheet
+and pillow on his berth.
+
+Then the train pulled out, amid a din of voices from the left--behind
+that nearly drowned the panting of overloaded engine. There was a roar
+of joy from the two coaches full of soldiers in the rear--a shriek from
+a woman who had missed the train--a babel of farewells tossed back and
+forth between the platform and the third-class carriages--and Peshawur
+fell away behind.
+
+King settled down on his side of the compartment, after a struggle with
+the thermantidote that refused to work. There was heat enough below the
+roof to have roasted meat, so that the physical atmosphere became as
+turgid as the mental after a little while.
+
+Hyde all but stripped himself and drew on striped pajamas. King was
+content to lie in shirt-sleeves on the other berth, with knees raised,
+so that Hyde could not overlook the general's papers. At his ease he
+studied them one by one, memorizing a string of names, with details as
+to their owners' antecedents and probable present whereabouts. There
+were several photographs in the packet, and he studied them very
+carefully indeed.
+
+But much most carefully of all he examined Yasmini's portrait, returning
+to it again and again. He reached the conclusion in the end that when it
+was taken she had been cunningly disguised.
+
+"This was intended for purpose of identification at a given time and
+place," he told himself.
+
+"Were you muttering at me?" asked Hyde.
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"It looked extremely like it!"
+
+"My mistake, sir. Nothing of the sort intended."
+
+"H-rrrrr-ummmmmph!"
+
+Hyde turned an indignant back on him, and King studied the back as if he
+found it interesting. On the whole he looked sympathetic, so it was as
+well that Hyde did not look around. Balked ambition as a rule loathes
+sympathy.
+
+After many prickly-hot, interminable, jolting hours the train drew up at
+Rawal-Pindi station. Instantly King was on his feet with his tunic on,
+and he was out on the blazing hot platform before the train's motion had
+quite ceased.
+
+He began to walk up and down, not elbowing but percolating through the
+crowd, missing nothing worth noticing in all the hot kaleidoscope and
+seeming to find new amusement at every turn. It was not in the least
+astonishing that a well-dressed native should address him presently, for
+he looked genial enough to be asked to hold a baby. King himself did not
+seem surprised at all. Far from it; he looked pleased.
+
+"Excuse me, sir," said the man in glib babu English. "I am seeking
+Captain King sahib, for whom my brother is veree anxious to be servant.
+Can you kindlee tell me, sir, where I could find Captain King sahib?"
+
+"Certainly," King answered him. He looked glad to be of help. "Are you
+traveling on this train?"
+
+The question sounded like politeness welling from the lips of
+unsuspicion.
+
+"Yes, sir. I am traveling from this place where I have spent a few days,
+to Bombay, where my business is.
+
+"How did you know King sahib is on the train?" King asked him, smiling
+so genially that even the police could not have charged him with more
+than curiosity.
+
+"By telegram, sir. My brother had the misfortune to miss Captain King
+sahib at Peshawur and therefore sent a telegram to me asking me to do
+what I can at an interview."
+
+"I see," said King. "I see." And judging by the sparkle in his eyes as
+he looked away he could see a lot. But the native could not see his eyes
+at that instant, although he tried to.
+
+He looked back at the train, giving the man a good chance to study his
+face in profile.
+
+"Oh, thank you, sir!" said the native oilily. "You are most kind! I am
+your humble servant, sir!"
+
+King nodded good-by to him, his dark eyes in the shadow of the khaki
+helmet seeming scarcely interested any longer.
+
+"Couldn't you find another berth?" Hyde asked him angrily when he
+stepped back into the compartment.
+
+"What were you out there looking for?"
+
+King smiled back at him blandly.
+
+"I think there are railway thieves on the train," he announced without
+any effort at relevance. He might not have heard the question.
+
+"What makes you think so?"
+
+"Observation, sir."
+
+"Oh! Then if you've seen thieves, why didn't you have 'em arrested? You
+were precious free with that authority of yours on Peshawur platform!"
+
+"Perhaps You'd care to take the responsibility, sir? Let me point out
+one of them."
+
+Full of grudging curiosity Hyde came to stand by him, and King stepped
+back just as the train began to move.
+
+"That man, sir--over there--no, beyond him--there!"
+
+Hyde thrust head and shoulders through the window, and a well-dressed
+native with one foot on the running-board at the back end of the train
+took a long steady stare at him before jumping in and slamming the door
+of a third-class carriage.
+
+"Which one?" demanded Hyde impatiently.
+
+"I don't see him now, sir!"
+
+Hyde snorted and returned to his seat in the silence of unspeakable
+scorn. But presently he opened a suitcase and drew out a repeating
+pistol which he cocked carefully and stowed beneath his pillow; not at
+all a contemptible move, because the Indian railway thief is the most
+resourceful specialist in the world. But King took no overt precautions
+of any kind.
+
+After more interminable hours night shut down on them, red-hot,
+black-dark, mesmerically subdivided into seconds by the thump of
+carriage wheels and lit at intervals by showers of sparks from the
+gasping engine. The din of Babel rode behind the first-class carriages,
+for all the natives in the packed third-class talked all together.
+(In India, when one has spent a fortune on a third-class ticket, one
+proceeds to enjoy the ride.) The train was a Beast out of Revelation,
+wallowing in noise.
+
+But after other, hotter hours the talking ceased. Then King, strangely
+without kicking off his shoes, drew a sheet up over his shoulders. On
+the opposite berth Hyde covered his head, to keep dust out of his hair,
+and presently King heard him begin to snore gently. Then, very carefully
+he adjusted his own position so that his profile lay outlined in the dim
+light from the gas lamp in the roof. He might almost have been waiting
+to be shaved.
+
+The stuffiness increased to a degree that is sometimes preached in
+Christian churches as belonging to a sulphurous sphere beyond the grave.
+Yet he did not move a muscle. It was long after midnight when his vigil
+was rewarded by a slight sound at the door. From that instant his eyes
+were on the watch, under dark of closed lashes; but his even breathing
+was that of the seventh stage of sleep that knows no dreams.
+
+A click of the door-latch heralded the appearance of a hand. With skill,
+of the sort that only special training can develop, a man in native
+dress insinuated himself into the carriage without making another sound
+of any kind. King's ears are part of the equipment for his exacting
+business, but he could not hear the door click shut again.
+
+For about five minutes, while the train swayed head-long into Indian
+darkness, the man stood listening and watching King's face. He stood
+so near that King recognized him for the one who had accosted him on
+Rawal-Pindi platform. And he could see the outline of the knife-hilt
+that the man's fingers clutched underneath his shirt.
+
+"He'll either strike first, so as to kill us both and do the looting
+afterward--and in that case I think it will be easier to break his neck
+than his arm--yes, decidedly his neck; it's long and thin;--or--"
+
+His eyes feigned sleep so successfully that the native turned away at
+last.
+
+"Thought so!" He dared open his eyes a mite wider. "He's pukka--true to
+type! Rob first and then kill! Rule number one with his sort, run when
+you've stabbed! Not a bad rule either, from their point of view!"
+
+As he watched, the thief drew the sheet back from Hyde's face, with
+trained fingers that could have taken spectacles from the victims' nose
+without his knowledge. Then as fish glide in and out among the reeds
+without touching them, swift and soft and unseen, his fingers searched
+Hyde's body. They found nothing. So they dived under the pillow and
+brought out the pistol and a gold watch.
+
+After that he began to search the clothes that hung on a hook beside
+Hyde's berth. He brought forth papers and a pocketbook--then money.
+Money went into one bag--papers and pocketbook into another. And that
+was evidence enough as well as risk enough. The knife would be due in a
+minute.
+
+King moved in his sleep, rather noisily, and the movement knocked a book
+to the floor from the foot of his berth. The noise of that awoke Hyde,
+and King pretended to begin to wake, yawning and rolling on his back
+(that being much the safest position an unarmed man can take and much
+the most awkward for his enemy).
+
+"Thieves!" Hyde yelled at the top of his lungs, groping wildly for his
+pistol and not finding it.
+
+King sat up and rubbed his eyes. The native drew the knife,
+and--believing himself in command of the situation--hesitated for one
+priceless second. He saw his error and darted for the door too late.
+With a movement unbelievably swift King was there ahead of him; and with
+another movement not so swift, but much more disconcerting, he threw his
+sheet as the retiarius used to throw a net in ancient Rome. It wrapped
+round the native's head and arms, and the two went together to the floor
+in a twisted stranglehold.
+
+In another half-minute the native was groaning, for King had his
+knife-wrist in two hands and was bending it backward while he pressed
+the man's stomach with his knees.
+
+"Get his loot!" he panted between efforts.
+
+The knife fell to the floor, and the thief made a gallant effort
+to recover it, but King was too strong for him. He seized the knife
+himself, slipped it in his own bosom and resumed his hold before the
+native guessed what he was after. Then he kept a tight grip while
+Hyde knelt to grope for his missing property. The major found both the
+thief's bags, and held them up.
+
+"I expect that's all," said King, loosening his grip very gradually.
+The native noticed--as Hyde did not--that King had begun to seem almost
+absent-minded; the thief lay quite still, looking up, trying to divine
+his next intention. Suddenly the brakes went on, but King's grip did not
+tighten. The train began to scream itself to a standstill at a wayside
+station, and King (the absent-minded)--very nearly grinned.
+
+"If I weren't in such an infernal hurry to reach Bombay--" Hyde
+grumbled; and King nearly laughed aloud then, for the thief knew
+English, and was listening with all his ears, "--may I be damned if I
+wouldn't get off at this station and wait to see that scoundrel brought
+to justice!"
+
+The train jerked itself to a standstill, and a man with a lantern began
+to chant the station's name.
+
+"Damn it!--I'm going to Bombay to act censor. I can't wait--they want me
+there."
+
+The instant the train's motion altogether ceased the heat shut in on
+them as if the lid of Tophet had been slammed. The prickly beat burst
+out all over Hyde's skin and King's too.
+
+"Almighty God!" gasped Hyde, beginning to fan himself.
+
+There was plenty of excuse for relaxing hold still further, and King
+made full use of it. A second later he gave a very good pretense of pain
+in his finger-ends as the thief burst free. The native made a dive
+at his bosom for the knife, but he frustrated that. Then he made a
+prodigious effort, just too late, to clutch the man again, and he did
+succeed in tearing loose a piece of shirt; but the fleeing robber must
+have wondered, as he bolted into the blacker shadows of the station
+building, why such an iron-fingered, wide-awake sahib should have made
+such a truly feeble showing at the end.
+
+"Damn it!--couldn't you hold him? Were you afraid of him, or what?"
+demanded Hyde, beginning to dress himself. Instead of answering, King
+leaned out into the lamp-lit gloom, and in a minute he caught sight of a
+sergeant of native infantry passing down the train. He made a sign that
+brought the man to him on the run.
+
+"Did you see that runaway?" he asked.
+
+"Ha, sahib. I saw one running. Shall I follow?"
+
+"No. This piece of his shirt will identify him. Take it. Hide it! When
+a man with a torn shirt, into which that piece fits, makes for the
+telegraph office after this train has gone on, see that he is allowed to
+send any telegrams he wants to! Only, have copies of every one of them
+wired to Captain King, care of the station-master, Delhi. Have you
+understood?"
+
+"Ha, sahib."
+
+"Grab him, and lock him up tight afterward--but not until he has sent
+his telegrams!'
+
+"Atcha, sahib."
+
+"Make yourself scarce, then!"
+
+Major Hyde was dressed, having performed that military evolution in
+something less than record time.
+
+"Who was that you were talking to?" he demanded. But King continued to
+look out the door.
+
+Hyde came and tapped on his shoulder impatiently, but King did not seem
+to understand until the native sergeant had quite vanished into the
+shadows.
+
+"Let me pass, will you!" Hyde demanded. "I'll have that thief caught if
+the train has to wait a week while they do it!"
+
+He pushed past, but he was scarcely on the step when the station-master
+blew his whistle, and his colored minion waved a lantern back and forth.
+The engine shrieked forthwith of death and torment; carriage doors
+slammed shut in staccato series; the heat relaxed as the engine
+moved--loosened--let go--lifted at last, and a trainload of hot
+passengers sighed thanks to an unresponsive sky as the train gained
+speed and wind crept in through the thermantidotes.
+
+Only through the broken thermantidote in King's compartment no wet
+air came. Hyde knelt on King's berth and wrestled with it like a caged
+animal, but with no result except that the sweat poured out all over him
+and he was more uncomfortable than before.
+
+"What are you looking at?" he demanded at last, sitting on King's berth.
+His head swam. He had to wait a few seconds before he could step across
+to his own side.
+
+"Only a knife," said King. He was standing under the dim gas lamp that
+helped make the darkness more unbearable.
+
+"Not that robber's knife? Did he drop it?"
+
+"It's my knife," said King.
+
+"Strange time to stand staring at it, if it's yours! Didn't you ever see
+it before?"
+
+King stowed the knife away in his bosom, and the major crossed to his
+own side.
+
+"I'm thinking I'll know it again, at all events!" King answered, sitting
+down. "Good night, sir."
+
+"Good night."
+
+Within ten minutes Hyde was asleep, snoring prodigiously. Then King
+pulled out the knife again and studied it for half an hour. The blade
+was of bronze, with an edge hammered to the keenness of a razor. The
+hilt was of nearly pure gold, in the form of a woman dancing.
+
+The whole thing was so exquisitely wrought that age had only softened
+the lines, without in the least impairing them. It looked like one of
+those Grecian toys with which Roman women of Nero's day stabbed their
+lovers. But that was not why he began to whistle very softly to himself.
+
+Presently he drew out the general's package of papers, with the
+photograph on the top. He stood up, to hold both knife and papers close
+to the light in the roof.
+
+It needed no great stretch of imagination to suggest a likeness between
+the woman of the photograph and the other, of the golden knife-hilt.
+And nobody, looking at him then, would have dared suggest he lacked
+imagination.
+
+If the knife had not been so ancient they might have been portraits of
+the same woman, in the same disguise, taken at the same time.
+
+"She knew I had been chosen to work with her. The general sent her word
+that I am coming," he muttered to himself. "Man number one had a try for
+me, but I had him pinched too soon. There must have been a spy watching
+at Peshawur, who wired to Rawal-Pindi for this man to jump the train and
+go on with the job. She must have had him planted at Rawal-Pindi in case
+of accidents. She seems thorough! Why should she give the man a knife
+with her own portrait on it? Is she queen of a secret society? Well--we
+shall see!"
+
+He sat down on his berth again and sighed, not discontentedly. Then
+he lit one of his great black cigars and blew rings for five or six
+minutes. Then he lay back with his head on the pillow, and before five
+minutes more had gone he was asleep, with the cold cigar still clutched
+between his fingers.
+
+He looked as interesting in his sleep as when awake. His mobile face in
+repose looked Roman, for the sun had tanned his skin and his nose was
+aquiline. In museums, where sculptured heads of Roman generals and
+emperors stand around the wall on pedestals, it would not be difficult
+to pick several that bore more than a faint resemblance to him. He had
+breadth and depth of forehead and a jowl that lent itself to smiles as
+well as sternness, and a throat that expressed manly determination in
+every molded line.
+
+He slept like a boy until dawn; and he and Hyde had scarcely exchanged
+another dozen words when the train screamed next day into Delhi station.
+Then he saluted stiffly and was gone.
+
+"Young jackanapes!" Hyde muttered after him. "Lazy young devil! He ought
+to be with his regiment, marching and setting a good example to his men!
+We'll have our work cut out to win this war, if there are many of his
+stamp! And I'm afraid there are--I'm afraid so--far too many of 'em!
+Pity! Such a pity! If the right men were at the top the youngsters
+at the foot of the ladder would mind their P's and Q's. As it is, I'm
+afraid we shall get beaten in this show. Dear, oh, dear!"
+
+Being what he was, and consistent before all things, Major Hyde drew
+out his writing materials there and then and wrote a report against
+Athelstan King, which he signed, addressed to headquarters and mailed at
+the first opportunity. There some future historian may find it and draw
+from it unkind deductions on the morale of the British army.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+
+
+     The only things which can not be explained are facts.  So,
+     use 'em. A riddle is proof there is a key to it.  Nor is it
+     a riddle when you've got the key. Life is as simple as all
+     that.--Cocker
+
+
+Delhi boasts a round half-dozen railway stations, all of them designed
+with regard to war, so that to King there was nothing unexpected in the
+fact that the train had brought him to an unexpected station. He
+plunged into its crowd much as a man in the mood might plunge into a
+whirlpool,--laughing as he plunged, for it was the most intoxicating
+splurge of color, din and smell that even India, the many-peopled--even
+Delhi, mother of dynasties--ever had, evolved.
+
+The station echoed--reverberated--hummed. A roar went up of human
+voices, babbling in twenty tongues, and above that rose in differing
+degrees the ear-splitting shriek of locomotives, the blare of bugles,
+the neigh of led horses, the bray of mules, the jingle of gun-chains and
+the thundering cadence of drilled feet.
+
+At one minute the whole building shook to the thunder of a grinning
+regiment; an instant later it clattered to the wrought-steel hammer of a
+thousand hoofs, as led troop-horses danced into formation to invade the
+waiting trucks. Loaded trucks banged into one another and thunderclapped
+their way into the sidings. And soldiers of nearly every Indian military
+caste stood about everywhere, in what was picturesque confusion to the
+uninitiated, yet like the letters of an index to a man who knew. And
+King knew. Down the back of each platform Tommy Atkins stood in long
+straight lines, talking or munching great sandwiches or smoking.
+
+The heat smelt and felt of another world. The din was from the same
+sphere. Yet everywhere was hope and geniality and by-your-leave as if
+weddings were in the wind and not the overture to death.
+
+Threading his way in and out among the motley swarm with a
+great black cheroot between his teeth and sweat running into
+his eyes from his helmet-band, Athelstan King strode at ease--at
+home--intent--amused--awake--and almost awfully happy. He was not in the
+least less happy because perfectly aware that a native was following him
+at a distance, although he did wonder how the native had contrived to
+pass within the lines.
+
+The general at Peshawur had compressed about a ton of miscellaneous
+information into fifteen hurried minutes, but mostly he had given him
+leave and orders to inform himself; so the fun was under way of winning
+exact knowledge in spite of officers, not one of whom would not have
+grown instantly suspicions at the first asked question. At the end of
+fifteen minutes there was not a glib staff-officer there who could have
+deceived him as to the numbers and destination of the force entraining.
+
+"Kerachi!" he told himself, chewing the butt of his cigar and keeping
+well ahead of the shadowing native. Always keep a "shadow" moving until
+you're ready to deal with him is one of Cocker's very soundest rules.
+
+"Turkey hasn't taken a hand yet--the general said so. No holy war yet.
+These'll be held in readiness to cross to Basra in case the Turks
+begin. While they wait for that at Kerachi the tribes won't dare begin
+anything. One or two spies are sure to break North and tell them what
+this force is for--but the tribes won't believe. They'll wait until the
+force has moved to Basra before they take chances. Good! That means no
+especial hurry for me!"
+
+He did not have to return salutes, because he did not look for them.
+Very few people noticed him at all, although he was recognized once
+or twice by former messmates, and one officer stopped him with an
+out-stretched hand.
+
+"Shake hands, you old tramp! Where are you bound for next? Tibet by any
+chance--or is it Samarkand this time?"
+
+"Oh, hullo, Carmichel!" he answered, beaming instant good-fellowship.
+"Where are you bound for?" And the other did not notice that his own
+question had not been answered.
+
+"Bombay! Bombay--Marseilles--Brussels--Berlin!"
+
+"Wish you luck!" laughed King, passing on. Every living man there, with
+the exception of a few staff-officers, believed himself en route for
+Europe; their faces said as much. Yet King took another look at the
+piles of stores and at the kits the men carried.
+
+"Who'd take all that stuff to Europe, where they make it?" he reflected.
+"And what 'u'd they use camel harness for in France?"
+
+At his leisure--in his own way, that was devious and like a string of
+miracles--he filtered toward the telegraph office. The native who had
+followed him all this time drew closer, but he did not let himself be
+troubled by that.
+
+He whispered proof of his identity to the telegraph clerk, who was a
+Royal Engineer, new to that job that morning, and a sealed telegram was
+handed to him at once. The "shadow" came very close indeed, presumably
+to try and read over his shoulder from behind, but he side-stepped into
+a corner and read the telegram with his back to the wall.
+
+It was in English, no doubt to escape suspicion; and because it was
+war-time, and the censorship had closed on India like a throttling
+string, it was not in code. So the wording, all things considered, had
+to be ingenious, for the Mirza Ali, of the Fort, Bombay, to whom it
+was addressed, could scarcely be expected to read more than between the
+lines. The lines had to be there to read between.
+
+"Cattle intended for slaughter," it ran, "despatched Bombay on Fourteen
+down. Meet train. Will be inspected en route, but should be dealt with
+carefully, on arrival. Cattle inclined to stampede owing to bad scare
+received to North of Delhi. Take all precautions and notify Abdul." It
+was signed "Suliman."
+
+"Good!" he chuckled. "Let's hope we get Abdul too. I wonder who he is!"
+
+Still uninterested in the man who shadowed him, he walked back to the
+office window and wrote two telegrams; one to Bombay, ordering the
+arrest of Ali Mirza of the Fort, with an urgent admonition to discover
+who his man Abdul might be, and to seize him as soon as found; the other
+to the station in the north, insisting on dose confinement for Suliman.
+
+"Don't let him out on any terms at all!" he wired.
+
+That being all the urgent business, he turned leisurely to face his
+shadow, and the native met his eyes with the engaging frankness of an
+old friend, coming forward with outstretched hand. They did not shake
+hands, for King knew better than to fall into the first trap offered
+him. But the man made a signal with his fingers that is known to not
+more than a dozen men in all the world, and that changed the situation
+altogether.
+
+"Walk with me," said King, and the man fell into stride beside him.
+
+He was a Rangar,--which is to say a Rajput who, or whose ancestors had
+turned Muhammadan. Like many Rajputs he was not a big man, but he looked
+fit and wiry; his head scarcely came above the level of King's chin,
+although his turban distracted attention from the fact. The turban was
+of silk and unusually large.
+
+The whitest of well-kept teeth, gleaming regularly under a little black
+waxed mustache betrayed no trace of betel-nut or other nastiness, and
+neither his fine features nor his eyes suggested vice of the sort that
+often undermines the character of Rajput youth.
+
+On second thoughts, and at the next opportunity to see them, King was
+not so sure that the eyes were brown, and he changed his opinion about
+their color a dozen times within the hour. Once he would even have sworn
+they were green.
+
+The man was well-to-do, for his turban was of costly silk, and he was
+clad in expensive jodpur riding breeches and spurred black riding boots,
+all perfectly immaculate. The breeches, baggy above and tight, below,
+suggested the clean lines of cat-like agility and strength.
+
+The upper part of his costume was semi-European. He was a regular Rangar
+dandy, of the type that can be seen playing polo almost any day at
+Mount Abu--that gets into mischief with a grace due to practise and
+heredity--but that does not manage its estates too well, as a rule, nor
+pay its debts in a hurry.
+
+"My name is Rewa Gunga," he said in a low voice, looking up sidewise at
+King a shade too guilelessly. Between Cape Comorin and the Northern Ice
+guile is normal, and its absence makes the wise suspicious.
+
+"I am Captain King."
+
+"I have a message for you."
+
+"From whom?"
+
+"From her!" said the Rangar, and without exactly knowing why, or being
+pleased with himself, King felt excited.
+
+They were walking toward the station exit. King had a trunk check in
+his hand, but returned it to pocket, not proposing just yet to let this
+Rangar over--hear instructions regarding the trunk's destination; he was
+too good-looking and too overbrimming with personal charm to be trusted
+thus early in the game. Besides, there was that captured knife, that
+hinted at lies and treachery. Secret signs as well as loot have been
+stolen before now.
+
+"I'd like to walk through the streets and see the crowd."
+
+He smiled as he said that, knowing well that the average young Rajput of
+good birth would rather fight a tiger with cold steel than walk a mile
+or two. He drew fire at once.
+
+"Why walk, King sahib? Are we animals? There is a carriage waiting--her
+carriage--and a coachman whose ears were born dead. We might be
+overheard in the street. Are you and I children, tossing stones into a
+pool to watch the rings widen!"
+
+"Lead on, then," answered King.
+
+Outside the station was a luxuriously modern victoria, with C springs
+and rubber tires, with horses that would have done credit to a viceroy.
+The Rangar motioned King to get in first, and the moment they were both
+seated the Rajput coachman set the horses to going like the wind. Rewa
+Gunga opened a jeweled cigarette case.
+
+"Will you have one?" he asked with the air of royalty entertaining a
+blood-equal.
+
+King accepted a cigarette for politeness' sake and took occasion to
+admire the man's slender wrist, that was doubtless hard and strong as
+woven steel, but was not much more than half the thickness of his own.
+
+The Rajputs as a race are proud of their wrists and hands. Their swords
+are made with a hilt so small that none save a Rajput of the blood could
+possibly use one; yet there is no race in all warring India, nor any
+in the world, that bears a finer record for hard fighting and sheer
+derring-do. One of the questions that occurred to King that minute was
+why this well-bred youngster whose age he guessed at twenty-two or so
+had not turned his attention to the army.
+
+"My height!"
+
+The man had read his thoughts!
+
+"Not quite tall enough. Besides--you are a soldier, are you not? And do
+you fight?"
+
+He nodded toward a dozen water-buffaloes, that slouched along the street
+with wet goatskin mussuks slung on their blue flanks.
+
+"They can fight," he said smiling. "So can any other fool!" Then, after
+a minute of rather strained silence: "My message is from her."
+
+"From Yasmini?"
+
+"Who else?"
+
+King accepted the rebuke with a little inclination of the head. He spoke
+as little as possible, because he was puzzled. He had become conscious
+of a puzzled look in the Rangar's eyes--of a subtle wonderment that
+might be intentional flattery (for Art and the East are one). Whenever
+the East is doubtful, and recognizes doubt, it is as dangerous as a
+hillside in the rains, and it only added to his problem if the Rangar
+found in him something inexplicable. The West can only get the better of
+the East when the East is too cock-sure.
+
+"She has jolly well gone North!" said the Rangar suddenly, and King
+shut his teeth with a snap. He sat bolt upright, and the Rangar allowed
+himself to look amused.
+
+"When? Why?"
+
+"She was too jolly well excited to wait, sahib! She is of the North,
+you know. She loves the North, and the men of the 'Hills'; and she knows
+them because she loves them. There came a tar (telegram) from Peshawur,
+from a general, to say King sahib comes to Delhi; but already she had
+completed all arrangements here. She was in a great stew, I can assure
+you. Finally she said, 'Why should I wait?' Nobody could answer her."
+
+He spoke English well enough. Few educated foreign gentlemen could have
+spoken it better, although there was the tendency to use slang that
+well-bred natives insist on picking up from British officers; and as he
+went on, here and there the native idiom crept through, translated. King
+said nothing, but listened and watched, puzzled more than he would
+have cared to admit by the look in the Rangar's eyes. It was not
+suspicion--nor respect. Yet there was a suggestion of both.
+
+"At last she said, 'It is well; I will not wait! I know of this sahib.
+He is a man whose feet stand under him and he will not tread my growing
+flowers into garbage! He will be clever enough to pick up the end of
+the thread that I shall leave behind and follow it and me! He is a true
+bound, with a nose that reads the wind, or the general sahib never would
+have sent him!' So she left me behind, sahib, to--to present to you the
+end of the thread of which she spoke."
+
+King tossed away the stump of the cigarette and rolled his tongue round
+the butt of a fresh cheroot. The word "hound" is not necessarily a
+compliment in any of a thousand Eastern tongues and gains little by
+translation. It might have been a slip, but the East takes advantage of
+its own slips as well as of other peoples' unless watched.
+
+The carriage swayed at high speed round three sharp corners in
+succession before the Rangar spoke again.
+
+"She has often heard of you," he said then. That was not unlikely, but
+not necessarily true either. If it were true, it did not help to account
+for the puzzled look in the Rangar's eyes, that increased rather than
+diminished.
+
+"I've heard of her," said King.
+
+"Of course! Who has not? She has desired to meet you, sahib, ever since
+she was told you are the best man in your service."
+
+King grunted, thinking of the knife beneath his shirt.
+
+"She is very glad that you and she are on the same errand." He leaned
+forward for the sake of emphasis and laid a finger on King's hand. It
+was a delicate, dainty finger with an almond nail. "She is very glad.
+She is far more glad than you imagine, or than you would believe. King
+sahib, she is all bucked up about it! Listen--her web is wide! Her
+agents are here--there--everywhere, and she is obeyed as few kings have
+ever been! Those agents shall all be held answerable for your life,
+sahib,--for she has said so! They are one and all your bodyguard, from
+now forward!"
+
+King inclined his head politely, but the weight of the knife inside
+his shirt did not encourage credulity. True, it might not be Yasmini's
+knife, and the Rangar's emphatic assurance might not be an unintentional
+admission that the man who had tried to use it was Yasmini's man. But
+when a man has formed the habit of deduction, he deduces as he goes
+along, and is prone to believe what his instinct tells him.
+
+Again, it was as if the Rangar read a part of his thoughts, if not all
+of them. It is not difficult to counter that trick, but to do it a man
+must be on his guard, or the East will know what he has thought and what
+he is going to think, as many have discovered when it was too late.
+
+"Her men are able to protect anybody's life from any God's number of
+assassins, whatever may lead you to think the contrary. From now forward
+your life is in her men's keeping!"
+
+"Very good of her; I'm sure," King murmured. He was thinking of the
+general's express order to apply for a "passport" that would take him
+into Khinjan Caves--mentally cursing the necessity for asking any kind
+of favor,--and wondering whether to ask this man for it or wait until he
+should meet Yasmini. He had about made up his mind that to wait would
+be quite within a strict interpretation of his orders, as well as
+infinitely more agreeable to himself, when the Rangar answered his
+thoughts again as if he had spoken them aloud.
+
+"She left this with me, saying I am to give it to you! I am to say that
+wherever you wear it, between here and Afghanistan, your life shall be
+safe and you may come and go!"
+
+King stared. The Rangar drew a bracelet from an inner pocket and held it
+out. It was a wonderful, barbaric thing of pure gold, big enough for a
+grown man's wrist, and old enough to have been hammered out in the very
+womb of time. It looked almost like ancient Greek, and it fastened with
+a hinge and clasp that looked as if they did not belong to it, and might
+have been made by a not very skillful modern jeweler.
+
+"Won't you wear it?" asked Rewa Gunga, watching him. "It will prove a
+true talisman! What was the name of the Johnny who had a lamp to rub?
+Aladdin? It will be better than what he had! He could only command a lot
+of bogies. This will give you authority over flesh and blood! Take it,
+sahib!"
+
+So King put it on, letting it slip up his sleeve, out of sight,--with
+a sensation as the snap closed of putting handcuffs on himself. But the
+Rangar looked relieved.
+
+"That is your passport, sahib! Show it to a Hill-man whenever you
+suppose yourself in danger. The Raj might go to pieces, but while
+Yasmini lives--"
+
+"Her friends will boast about her, I suppose!"
+
+King finished the sentence for him because it is considered good
+form for natives to hint at possible dissolution of the Anglo-Indian
+Government. Everybody knows that the British will not govern India
+forever, but the British--who know it best of all, and work to that end
+most fervently--are the only ones encouraged to talk about it.
+
+For a few minutes after that Rewa Gunga held his peace, while the
+carriage swayed at breakneck speed through the swarming streets. They
+had to drive slower in the Chandni Chowk, for the ancient Street of the
+Silversmiths that is now the mart of Delhi was ablaze with crude colors,
+and was thronged with more people than ever since '57. There were a
+thousand signs worth studying by a man who could read them.
+
+King, watching and saying nothing, reached the conclusion that Delhi was
+in hand--excited undoubtedly, more than a bit bewildered, watchful,
+but in hand. Without exactly knowing how he did it, he grew aware of a
+certain confidence that underlay the surface fuss. After that the sea
+of changing patterns and raised voices ceased to have any particular
+interest for him and he lay back against the cushions to pay stricter
+attention to his own immediate affairs.
+
+He did not believe for a second the lame explanation Yasmini had left
+behind. She must have some good reason for wishing to be first up the
+Khyber, and he was very sorry indeed she had slipped away. It might be
+only jealousy, yet why should she be jealous? It might be fear--yet why
+should she be afraid?
+
+It was the next remark of the Rangar's that set him entirely on his
+guard, and thenceforward whoever could have read his thoughts would have
+been more than human. Perhaps it is the most dominant characteristic of
+the British race that it will not defend itself until it must. He had
+known of that thought-reading trick ever since his ayah (native
+nurse) taught him to lisp Hindustanee; just as surely he knew that its
+impudent, repeated use was intended to sap his belief in himself. There
+is not much to choose between the native impudence that dares intrude on
+a man's thoughts, and the insolence that understands it, and is rather
+too proud to care.
+
+"I'll bet you a hundred dibs," said the Rangar, "that she jolly well
+didn't fancy your being on the scene ahead of her! I'll bet you she
+decided to be there first and get control of the situation! Take me?
+You'd lose if you did! She's slippery, and quick, and like all Women,
+she's jealous!"
+
+The Rangar's eyes were on his, but King was not to be caught again.
+It is quite easy to think behind a fence, so to speak, if one gives
+attention to it.
+
+"She will be busy presently fooling those Afridis," he continued, waving
+his cigarette. "She has fooled them always, to the limit of their bally
+bent. They all believe she is their best friend in the world--oh, dear
+Yes, you bet they do! And so she is--so she is--but not in the way they
+think! They believe she plots with them against the Raj! Poor silly
+devils! Yet Yasmini loves them! They want war--blood--loot! It is all
+they think about! They are seldom satisfied unless their wrists and
+elbows are bally well red with other peoples' gore! And while they
+are picturing the loot, and the slaughter of unbelievers--(as if they
+believed anything but foolishness themselves!)--Yasmini plays her own
+game, for amusement and power--a good game--a deep game! You have seen
+already how India has to ask her aid in the 'Hills'! She loves power,
+power, power--not for its name, for names are nothing, but to use
+it. She loves the feel of it! Fighting is not power! Blood-letting
+is foolishness. If there is any blood spilt it is none of her
+doing--unless--"
+
+"Unless what?" asked King.
+
+"Oh--sometimes there were fools who interfered. You can not blame her
+for that."
+
+"You seem to be a champion of hers! How long have you known her?"'
+
+The Rangar eyed him sharply.
+
+"A long time. She and I played together when we were children. I know
+her whole history--and that is something nobody else in the world knows
+but she herself. You see, I am favored. It is because she knows me very
+well that she chose me to travel North with you, when you start to find
+her in the 'Hills'!"
+
+King cleared his throat, and the Rangar nodded, looking into his eyes
+with the engaging confidence of a child who never has been refused
+anything, in or out of reason. King made no effort to look pleased, so
+the Rangar drew on his resources.
+
+"I have a letter from her," he stated blandly.
+
+From a pocket in the carriage cushions he brought out a silver tube,
+richly carved in the Kashmiri style and closed at either end with a
+tightly fitting silver cap. King accepted it and drew the cap from one
+end. A roll of scented paper fell on his lap, and a puff of hot wind
+combined with a lurch of the carriage springs came near to lose it
+for him; he snatched it just in time and unrolled it to find a letter
+written to himself in Urdu, in a beautiful flowing hand.
+
+Urdu is perhaps the politest of written tongues and lends itself most
+readily to indirectness; but since he did not expect to read a catalogue
+of exact facts, he was not disappointed.
+
+Translated, the letter ran:
+
+        "To Athelstan King sahib, by the hand of Rewa Gunga.
+        Greeting.  The bearer is my well-trusted servant, whom
+        I have chosen to be the sahib's guide until Heaven
+        shall be propitious and we meet.  He is instructed
+        in all that he need know concerning what is now in hand,
+        and he will tell by word of mouth such things as ought
+        not to be written.  By all means let Rewa Gunga travel
+        with you, for he is of royal blood, of the House of
+        Ketchwaha and will not fail you.  His honor and mine
+        are one.  Praying that the many gods of India may heap
+        honors on your honor's head, providing each his proper
+        attribute toward entire ability to succeed in all things,
+        but especially in the present undertaking,
+
+        "I am Your Excellency's humble servant,
+        --Yasmini."
+
+He had barely finished reading it when the coachman took a last corner
+at a gallop and drew the horses up on their haunches at a door in a high
+white wall. Rewa Gunga sprang out of the carriage before the horses were
+quite at a standstill.
+
+"Here we are!" he said, and King, gathering up the letter and the silver
+tube, noticed that the street curved here so that no other door and no
+window overlooked this one.
+
+He followed the Rangar, and he was no sooner into the shadow of the door
+than the coachman lashed the horses and the carriage swung out of view.
+
+"This way," said the Rangar over his shoulder. "Come!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+
+     Lie to a liar, for lies are his coin.
+     Steal from a thief, for that is easy.
+     Set a trap for a trickster, and catch him at the first attempt.
+     But beware of the man who has no axe to grind.
+     --Eastern Proverb
+
+
+It was a musty smelling entrance, so dark that to see was scarcely
+possible after the hot glare outside. Dimly King made out Rewa Gunga
+mounting stairs to the left and followed him. The stairs wound backward
+and forward on themselves four times, growing scarcely any lighter as
+they ascended, until, when he guessed himself two stories at least above
+road level, there was a sudden blaze of reflected light and he blinked
+at more mirrors than he could count. They had been swung on hinges
+suddenly to throw the light full in his face.
+
+There were curtains reflected in each mirror, and little glowing lamps,
+so cunningly arranged that it was not possible to guess which were
+real and which were not. Rewa Gunga offered no explanation, but stood
+watching with quiet amusement. He seemed to expect King to take a chance
+and go forward, but if he did he reckoned without his guest. King stood
+still.
+
+Then suddenly, as if she had done it a thousand times before and
+surprised a thousand people, a little nut-brown maid parted the middle
+pair of curtains and said "Salaam!" smiling with teeth that were as
+white as porcelain. All the other curtains parted too, so that the
+whereabouts of the door might still have been in doubt had she not
+spoken and so distinguished herself from her reflections. King looked
+scarcely interested and not at all disturbed.
+
+Balked of his amusement, Rewa Gunga hurried past him, thrusting the
+little maid aside, and led the way. King followed him into a long room,
+whose walls were hung with richer silks than any he remembered to have
+seen. In a great wide window to one side some twenty, women began at
+once to make flute music.
+
+Silken punkahs swung from chains, wafting back and forth a cloud of
+sandalwood smoke that veiled the whole scene in mysterious, scented
+mist. Through the open window came the splash of a fountain and the
+chattering of birds, and the branch of a feathery tree drooped near by.
+It seemed that the long white wall below was that of Yasmini's garden.
+
+"Be welcome!" laughed Rewa Gunga; "I am to do the honors, since she is
+not here. Be seated, sahib."
+
+King chose a divan at the room's farthest end, near tall curtains that
+led into rooms beyond. He turned his back toward the reason for his
+choice. On a little ivory-inlaid ebony table about ten feet away lay a
+knife, that was almost the exact duplicate of the one inside his shirt.
+Bronze knives of ancient date, with golden handles carved to represent a
+woman dancing, are rare. The ability to seem not to notice incriminating
+evidence is rarer still--rarest of all when under the eyes of a native
+of India, for cats and hawks are dullards by comparison to them. But
+King saw the knife, yet did not seem to see it.
+
+There was nothing there calculated to set an Englishman at ease. In
+spite of the Rangar's casual manner, Yasmini's reception room felt
+like the antechamber to another world, where mystery is atmosphere and
+ordinary air to breathe is not at all. He could sense hushed expectancy
+on every side--could feel the eyes of many women fixed on him--and began
+to draw on his guard as a fighting man draws on armor. There and then he
+deliberately set himself to resist mesmerism, which is the East's chief
+weapon.
+
+Rewa Gunga, perfectly at home, sprawled leisurely, along a cushioned
+couch with a grace that the West has not learned yet; but King did not
+make the mistake of trusting him any better for his easy manners, and
+his eyes sought swiftly for some unrhythmic, unplanned thing on which to
+rest, that he might save himself by a sort of mental leverage.
+
+Glancing along the wall that faced the big window, he noticed for the
+first time a huge Afridi, who sat on a stool and leaned back against the
+silken hangings with arms folded.
+
+"Who is that man?" he asked.
+
+"He? Oh, he is a savage--just a big savage," said Rewa Gunga, looking
+vaguely annoyed.
+
+"Why is he here?"
+
+He did not dare let go of this chance side-issue. He knew that Rewa
+Gunga wished him to talk of Yasmini and to ask questions about her, and
+that if he succumbed to that temptation all his self-control would be
+cunningly sapped away from him until his secrets, and his very senses,
+belonged to some one else.
+
+"What is he doing here?" he insisted.
+
+"He? Oh, he does nothing. He waits," purred the Rangar. "He is to be
+your body-servant on your journey to the North. He is nothing--nobody at
+all!--except that he is to be trusted utterly because he loves Yasmini.
+He is Obedience! A big obedient fool! Let him be!"
+
+"No," said King. "If he's to be my man I'll speak to him!"
+
+He felt himself winning. Already the spell of the room was lifting, and
+he no longer felt the cloud of sandalwood smoke like a veil across his
+brain.
+
+"Won't you tell him to come here to me?"
+
+Rewa Gunga laughed, resting his silk turban against the wall hangings
+and clasping both hands about his knee. It was as a man might laugh who
+has been touched in a bout with foils.
+
+"Oh!--Ismail!" he called, with a voice like a bell, that made King
+stare.
+
+The Afridi seemed to come out of a deep sleep and looked bewildered,
+rubbing his eyes and feeling whether his turban was on straight. He
+combed his beard with nervous fingers as he gazed about him and caught
+Rewa Gunga's eye. Then he sprang to his feet.
+
+"Come!" ordered Rewa Gunga.
+
+The man obeyed.
+
+"Did you see?" Rewa Gunga chuckled. "He rose from his place like a
+buffalo, rump first and then shoulder after shoulder! Such men are safe!
+Such men have no guile beyond what will help them to obey! Such men
+think too slowly to invent deceit for its own sake!"
+
+The Afridi came and towered above them, standing with gnarled hands
+knotted into clubs.
+
+"What is thy name?" King asked him.
+
+"Ismail!" he boomed.
+
+"Thou art to be my servant?"
+
+"Aye! So said she. I am her man. I obey!"
+
+"When did she say so?" King asked him blandly, asking unexpected
+questions being half the art of Secret Service, although the other half
+is harder to achieve.
+
+The Hillman stroked his great beard and stood considering the question.
+One could almost imagine the click of slow machinery revolving in his
+mind, although King entertained a shrewd suspicion that he was not so
+stupid as he chose to seem. His eyes were too hawk-bright to be a stupid
+man's.
+
+"Before she went away," he answered at last.
+
+"When did she go away?"
+
+He thought again, then "Yesterday," he said.
+
+"Why did you wait before you answered?"
+
+The Afridi's eyes furtively sought Rewa Gunga's and found no aid there.
+Watching the Rangar less furtively, but even less obviously, King was
+aware that his eyes were nearly closed, as if they were not interested.
+The fingers that clasped his knee drummed on it indifferently, seeing
+which King allowed himself to smile.
+
+"Never mind," he told Ismail. "It is no matter. It is ever well to think
+twice before speaking once, for thus mistakes die stillborn. Only the
+monkey-folk thrive on quick answers--is it not so? Thou art a man of
+many inches--of thew and sinew--Hey, but thou art a man! If the heart
+within those great ribs of thine is true as thine arms are strong I
+shall be fortunate to have thee for a servant!"
+
+"Aye!" said the Afridi. "But what are words? She has said I am thy
+servant, and to hear her is to obey!"
+
+"Then from now thou art my servant?"
+
+"Nay, but from yesterday when she gave the order!"
+
+"Good!" said King.
+
+"Aye, good for thee! May Allah do more to me if I fail!"
+
+"Then, take me a telegram!" said King.
+
+He began to write at once on a half-sheet of paper that he tore from a
+letter he had in his pocket, setting down a row of figures at the top
+and transposing into cypher as he went along.
+
+"Yasmini has gone North. Is there any reason at your end why I should
+not follow her at once?"
+
+He addressed it in plain English to his friend the general at Peshawur,
+taking great care lest the Rangar read it through those sleepy,
+half-closed eyes of his. Then he tore the cypher from the top, struck
+a match and burned the strip of paper and handed the code telegram to
+Ismail, directing him carefully to a government office where the cypher
+signature would be recognized and the telegram given precedence.
+
+Ismail stalked off with it, striding like Moses down from
+Sinai--hook-nose--hawk-eye--flowing beard--dignity and all, and King
+settled down to guard himself against the next attempt on his sovereign
+self-command.
+
+Now he chose to notice the knife on the ebony table as if he had not
+seen it before. He got up and reached for it and brought it back,
+turning it over and over in his hand.
+
+"A strange knife," he said.
+
+"Yes,--from Khinjan," said Rewa Gunga, and King eyed him as one wolf
+eyes another.
+
+"What makes you say it is from Khinjan?"
+
+"She brought it from Khinjan Caves herself! There is another knife that
+matches it, but that is not here. That bracelet you now wear, sahib, is
+from Khinjan Caves too! She has the secret of the Caves!"
+
+"I have heard that the 'Heart of the Hills' is there," King answered.
+"Is the 'Heart of the Hills' a treasure house?"
+
+Rewa Gunga laughed.
+
+"Ask her, sahib! Perhaps she will tell you! Perhaps she will let you
+see! Who knows? She is a woman of resource and unexpectedness--Let her
+women dance for you a while."
+
+King nodded. Then he got up and laid the knife back on the little table.
+A minute or so later he noticed that at a sign from Rewa Gunga a woman
+left the great window place and spirited the knife away.
+
+"May I have a sheet of paper?" he asked, for he knew that another fight
+for his self-command was due.
+
+Rewa Gunga gave an order, and a maid brought him scented paper on a
+silver tray. He drew out his own fountain pen then and made ready.
+
+In spite of the great silken punkah that swung rhythmically across the
+full breadth of the room the beat was so great that the pen slipped
+round and round between his fingers. Yet he contrived to write, and
+since his one object was to give his brain employment, he wrote down
+a list of the names he had memorized in the train on the journey from
+Peshawur, not thinking of a use for the list until he had finished.
+Then, though, a real use occurred to him.
+
+While he began to write more than a dozen dancing women swept into the
+room from behind the silk hangings in a concerted movement that was all
+lithe slumberous grace. Wood-wind music called to them from the great
+deep window as snakes are summoned from their holes, and as cobras
+answer the charmer's call the women glided to the center and stood
+poised beneath the punkah.
+
+There they began to chant, still dreamily, and with the chant the dance
+began, in and out, round and round, lazily, ever so lazily, wreathed in
+buoyant gossamer that was scarcely more solid than the sandalwood smoke
+they wafted into rings.
+
+King watched them and listened to their chant until he began to
+recognize the strain on the eye-muscles that precedes the mesmeric
+spell. Then he wrote and read what he had written and wrote again. And
+after that, for the sake of mental exercise, he switched his thoughts
+into another channel altogether. He reverted to Delhi railway station.
+
+"The Turks can spy as well as anybody.--They know those men are going to
+Kerachi to be ready for them.--Therefore, having cut his eye-teeth B.C.
+several hundred, the Unspeakable Turk will take care not to misbehave
+UNTIL he's ready. And I suppose our government, being ours and we being
+us, will let him do it! All of which will take time.--And that again
+means no trouble in the Hills--probably--until the Turks really do feel
+ready to begin. They'll preach a holy war just ahead of the date. The
+tribes will keep quiet because an army at Kerachi might be meant for
+their benefit. Oh, yes, I'm quite sure they were entraining for Kerachi
+in readiness to move on Basra.
+
+"Trucks ready for camels--and camel drivers--and food for camels--and
+Eresby, who's just come from taking a special camel course. Not a doubt
+of it!--And then, Corrigan--Elwright--Doby--Gould--all on the platform
+in a bunch, and all down on the Army List as Turkish interpreters! Not a
+doubt left!"
+
+"What have you written?" asked a quiet voice at his ear; and he turned
+to look straight in the eyes of Rewa Gunga, who had leaned forward to
+read over his shoulder. Just for one second he hovered on the brink of
+quick defeat. Having escaped the Scylla of the dancing women, Charybdis
+waited for him in the shape of eyes that were pools of hot mystery. It
+was the sound of his own voice that brought him back to the world again
+and saved his will for him unbound.
+
+"Read it, won't you?" he laughed. "If you know, take this pen and mark
+the names of whichever of those men are still in Delhi."
+
+Rewa Gunga took pen and paper and set a mark against some thirty of the
+names, for King had a manner that disarmed refusal.
+
+"Where are the others?" he asked him, after a glance at it.
+
+"In jail, or else over the border."
+
+"Already?"
+
+The Rangar nodded. "Trust Yasmini! She saw to that jolly well before she
+left Delhi! She would have stayed had there been anything more to do!"
+
+King began to watch the dance again, for it did not feel safe to look
+too long into the Rangar's eyes. It was not wise just then to look too
+long at anything, or to think too long on any one subject.
+
+"Ismail is slow about returning," said the Rangar.
+
+"I wrote at the foot of the tar," said King, "that they are to detain
+him there until the answer comes."
+
+The Rangar's eyes blazed for a second and then grew cold again (as King
+did not fail to observe). He knew as well as the Rangar that not many
+men would have kept their will so unfettered in that room as to be able
+to give independent orders. He recognized resignation, temporary at
+least, in the Rangar's attitude of leaning back again to watch from
+under lowered eyelids. It was like being watched by a cat.
+
+All this while the women danced on, in time to wailing flute-music,
+until, it seemed from nowhere, a lovelier woman than any of them
+appeared in their midst, sitting cross-legged with a flat basket at her
+knees. She sat with arms raised and swayed from the waist as if in a
+delirium. Her arms moved in narrowing circles, higher and higher above
+the basket lid, and the lid began to rise. Nobody touched it, nor was
+there any string, but as it rose it swayed with sickening monotony.
+
+It was minutes before the bodies of two great king-cobras could be
+made out, moving against the woman's spangled dress. The basket lid was
+resting on their heads, and as the music and the chanting rose to a wild
+weird shriek the lid rose too, until suddenly the woman snatched the
+lid away and the snakes were revealed, with hoods raised, hissing the
+cobra's hate-song that is prelude to the poison-death.
+
+They struck at the woman, one after the other, and she leaped out of
+their range, swift and as supple as they. Instantly then she joined
+in the dance, with the snakes striking right and left at her. Left
+and right she swayed to avoid them, far more gracefully than a matador
+avoids the bull and courting a deadlier peril than he--poisonous, two to
+his one. As she danced she whirled both arms above her head and cried as
+the were-wolves are said to do on stormy nights.
+
+Some unseen hand drew a blind over the great window and an eerie
+green-and-golden light began to play from one end of the room, throwing
+the dancers into half-relief and deepening the mystery.
+
+Sweet strange scents were wafted in from under the silken hangings.
+The room grew cooler by unguessed means. Every sense was treacherously
+wooed. And ever, in the middle of the moving light among the languorous
+dancers, the snakes pursued the woman!
+
+"Do you do this often?" wondered King, in a calm aside to Rewa Gunga,
+turning half toward him and taking his eyes off the dance without any,
+very, great effort.
+
+Rewa Gunga clapped his hands and the dance ceased. The woman spirited
+her snakes away. The blind was drawn upward and in a moment all was
+normal again with the punkah swinging slowly overhead, except that the
+seductive smell remained, that was like the early-morning breath of all
+the different flowers of India.
+
+"If she were here," said the Rangar, a little grimly--with a trace of
+disappointment in his tone--"you would not snatch your eyes away
+like that! You would have been jolly well transfixed, my friend!
+These--she--that woman--they are but clumsy amateurs! If she were here,
+to dance with her snakes for you, you would have been jolly well dancing
+with her, if she had wished it! Perhaps you shall see her dance some
+day! Ah,--here is Ismail," he added in an altered tone of voice. He
+seemed relieved at sight of the Afridi.
+
+Bursting through the glass-bead curtains at the door, the great savage
+strode down the room, holding out a telegram. Rewa Gunga looked as if
+he would have snatched it, but King's hand was held out first and Ismail
+gave it to him. With a murmur of conventional apology King tore the
+envelope and in a second his eyes were ablaze with something more than
+wonder. A mystery, added to a mystery, stirred all the zeal in him. But
+in a second he had sweated his excitement down.
+
+"Read that, will you?" he said, passing it to Rewa Gunga. It was not in
+cypher, but in plain everyday English.
+
+"She has not gone North," it ran. "She is still in Delhi. Suit your own
+movements to your plans."
+
+"Can you explain?" asked King in a level voice. He was watching the
+Rangar narrowly, yet he could not detect the slightest symptom of
+emotion.
+
+"Explain?" said the Rangar. "Who can explain foolishness? It means that
+another fat general has made another fat mistake!"
+
+"What makes you so certain she went North?" King asked.
+
+Instead of answering, Rewa Gunga beckoned Ismail, who had stepped back
+out of hearing. The giant came and loomed over them like the Spirit of
+the Lamp of the Arabian Nights.
+
+"Whither went she?" asked the Rangar.
+
+"To the North!" he boomed.
+
+"How knowest thou?"
+
+"I saw her go!"
+
+"When went she?"
+
+"Yesterday, when a telegram came."
+
+The word "came" was the only clue to his meaning, for in the language he
+used "yesterday" and "to-morrow" are the same word; such is the East's
+estimate of time.
+
+"By what route did she go?" asked Rewa Gunga.
+
+"By the terrain from the station."
+
+"How knowest thou that?"
+
+"I was there, bearing her box of jewels."
+
+"Didst thou see her buy the tikkut?"
+
+"Nay, I bought it, for she ordered me."
+
+"For what destination was the tikkut?"
+
+"Peshawur!" said Ismail, filling his mouth with the word as if he loved
+it.
+
+"Yet"--it was King who spoke now, pointing an accusing finger at him--"a
+burra sahib sends a tar to me--this is it!--to say she is in Delhi
+still! Who told thee to answer those questions with those words?"
+
+"She!" the big man answered.
+
+"Yasmini?"
+
+"Aye! May Allah cover her with blessings!"
+
+"Ah!" said King. "You have my leave to depart out of earshot."
+
+Then he turned on Rewa Gunga.
+
+"Whatever the truth of all this," he said quietly, "I suppose it means
+she has done what there was to do in Delhi?"
+
+"Sahib,--trust her! Does a tigress hunt where no watercourses are, and
+where no game goes to drink? She follows the sambur!"
+
+"You are positive she has started for the North?"
+
+"Sahib, when she speaks it is best to believe! She told me she will go.
+Therefore I am ready to lead King sahib up the Khyber to her!"
+
+"Are you certain you can find her?"
+
+"Aye, sahib,--in the dark!"
+
+"There's a train leaves for the North to-night," said King.
+
+The Rangar nodded.
+
+"You'll want a pass up the line. How many servants? Three--four--how
+many?"
+
+"One," said the Rangar, and King was instantly suspicious of the modesty
+of that allowance; however he wrote out a pass for Rewa Gunga and one
+servant and gave it to him.
+
+"Be there on time and see about your own reservation," he said. "I'll
+attend to Ismail's pass myself."
+
+He folded the list of names that the Rangar had marked and wrote
+something on the back. Then he begged an envelope, and Rewa Gunga had
+one brought to him. He sealed the list in the envelope, addressed it and
+beckoned Ismail again.
+
+"Take this to Saunders sahib!" he ordered. "Go first to the telegraph
+office, where you were before, and the babu there will tell you where
+Saunders sahib may be found. Having found him, deliver the letter to
+him. Then come and find me at the Star of India Hotel and help me to
+bathe and change my clothes."
+
+"To hear is to obey!" boomed Ismail, bowing; but his last glance was
+for Rewa Gunga, and he did not turn to go until he had met the Rangar's
+eyes.
+
+When Ismail had gone striding down the room, with no glance to spare
+for the whispering women in the window, and with dignity like an aura
+exuding from him, King looked into the Rangar's eyes with that engaging
+frankness of his that disarms so many people.
+
+"Then you'll be on the train to-night?" he asked.
+
+"To hear is to obey! With pleasure, sahib!"
+
+"Then good-by until this evening."
+
+King bowed very civilly and walked out, rather unsteadily because his
+head ached. Probably nobody else, except the Rangar, could have guessed
+what an ordeal he had passed through or how near he had been to losing
+self-command.
+
+But as he felt his way down the stairs, that were dimly lighted now, he
+knew he had all his senses with him, for he "spotted" and admired the
+lurking places that had been designed for undoing of the unwary, or even
+the overwary. Yasmini's Delhi nest was like a hundred traps in one.
+
+"Almost like a pool table," he reflected. "Pocket 'em at both ends and
+the middle!"
+
+In the street he found a gharry after a while and drove to his hotel.
+And before Ismail came he took a stroll through a bazaar, where he made
+a few strange purchases. In the hotel lobby he invested in a leather bag
+with a good lock, in which to put them. Later on Ismail came and proved
+himself an efficient body-servant.
+
+That evening Ismail carried the leather bag and found his place on the
+train, and that was not so difficult, because the trains running North
+were nearly empty, although the platforms were all crowded. As he stood
+at the carriage door with Ismail near him, a man named Saunders slipped
+through the crowd and sought him out.
+
+"Arrested 'em all!" he grinned.
+
+"Good."
+
+"Seen anything of her? I recognized Yasmini's scent on your envelope.
+It's peculiar to her--one of her monopolies!"
+
+"No. I'm told she went North yesterday."
+
+"Not by train, she didn't! It's my business to know that!"
+
+King did not answer; nor did he look surprised. He was watching Rewa
+Gunga, followed by a servant, hurrying to a reserved compartment at the
+front end of the train. The Rangar waved to him and he waved back.
+
+"I'd know her in a million!" vowed Saunders. "I can take oath she hasn't
+gone anywhere by train! Unless she has walked, or taken a carriage,
+she's in Delhi!"
+
+The engine gave a preliminary shriek and the giant Ismail nudged King's
+elbow in impatient warning. There was no more sign of Rewa Gunga, who
+had evidently settled down in his compartment for the night.
+
+"Get my bag out again!" King ordered, and Ismail stared.
+
+"Get out my bag, I said!"
+
+"To hear is to obey!" Ismail grumbled, reaching with his long arm
+through the window.
+
+The engine shrieked again, somebody whistled, and the train began to
+move.
+
+"You've missed it!" said Saunders, amused at Ismail's frantic
+disappointment. The giant was tugging at his beard. "How about your
+trunk? Better wire ahead and have it spotted for you."
+
+        "No," said King;  "it's still in the baggage room a the
+other station. I didn't intend to go by this train. Came down here
+to see another fellow off, that's all! Have a cigar and then let's go
+together and look those prisoners over!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+
+
+   Men boast in the Hills, when they ought to pray;
+   For the wind blows lusty, and the blood runs red,
+   And Law lies belly upwards for a man to wreak his fancy on it.
+   Down in the plains, in the dust of the plains
+   Where law is master and a good man ought to boast,
+   They all lie belly downwards praying for their Hills again!
+
+
+The rear lights of the train he had not taken swayed out of Delhi
+station and King grinned as he wiped the sweat from his face with
+a dripping handkerchief. Behind him towered the hook-nosed Ismail,
+resentful of the unexpected. In front of him Saunders eyed the proffered
+black cheroots suspiciously, accepted one with an air of curiosity and
+passed the case back. Around them the clatter of the station crowd began
+to die, and Parsimony in a shabby uniform went round to lower lights.
+
+"Are you sure--"
+
+King's merry eyes looked into Saunders' as if there were no world war
+really and they two were puppets in a comedy.
+
+"--are you absolutely certain Yasmini is in Delhi?"
+
+"No," said Saunders. "What I swear to is that she has not left by train.
+It's my business to know who leaves by train."
+
+"What can you suggest?" asked King, twisting at his scrubby little
+mustache. But if he wished to convey the impression of a man at his
+wits' end, he failed signally.
+
+"I? Nothing! She's the most elusive individual in Asia! One person
+in the world knows where she is, unless she has an accomplice. My
+information's negative. I know she has not gone by--"
+
+King struck a match and held it out, so the sentence was unfinished;
+the first few puffs of the astonishing cigar wiped out all memory of the
+missing word. And then King changed the subject.
+
+"Those men I asked you to arrest--?"
+
+"Nabbed"--puff--"every one of 'em!"--puff--puff--"all
+under"--puff--puff--"lock and key,--best smoke I ever tasted--where
+d'you get 'em?"
+
+"Had they been in communication with her?"
+
+Puff--puff--"You bet they had! Where d'you get these things?"
+
+"Not her special men by any chance?"
+
+Puff--"Gad, what smoke!--couldn't say, of course,
+but"--puff--puff--"shouldn't think so."
+
+"Well--I'll go along with you if you like, and look them over."
+
+Both tone and manner gave Saunders credit for the suggestion, and
+Saunders seemed to like it. There is nothing like following up, in
+football, war or courtship.
+
+"I see you're a judge of a cigar," said King, and Saunders purred,
+all men being fools to some extent, and the only trouble being to
+demonstrate the fact.
+
+They had started for the station entrance when a nasal voice began
+intoning, "Cap-teen King sahib--Cap-teen King sahib!" and a telegraph
+messenger passed them with his book under his arm. King whistled him. A
+moment later he was tearing open an official urgent telegram and writing
+a string of figures in pencil across the top. Then he decoded swiftly,
+
+        "Advices are Yasmini was in Delhi as recently as six
+        this evening.  Fail to understand your inability to
+        get in touch.  Have you tried at her house?  Matters
+        in Khyber district much less satisfactory.  Word from
+        O-C Khyber Rifles to effect that lashkar is collecting.
+        Better sweep up in Delhi and proceed northward as quickly
+        as compatible with caution.   L. M. L."
+
+The three letters at the end were the general's coded signature. The
+wording of the telegram was such that as he read King saw a mental
+picture of the general's bald red skull and could almost hear him say
+the "fail to understand." The three words "much less satisfactory" were
+a bookful of information. So, as he folded up the telegram, tore the
+penciled strip of figures from the top and burned it with a match, he
+was at pains to look pleased.
+
+"Good news?" asked Saunders, blowing smoke through his nose.
+
+"Excellent. Where's my man? Here--you--Ismail!"
+
+The giant came and towered above him.
+
+"You swore she went North!"
+
+"Ha, sahib! To Peshawur she went!"
+
+"Did she start from this station?"
+
+"From where else, sahib?"
+
+But this was too much for Saunders, who stepped forward and thrust in
+an oar. King on the other band stepped back a pace so as to watch both
+faces.
+
+"Then, when did she go?"
+
+"I saw her go!" said Ismail, affronted.
+
+"When? When, confound you! When?"
+
+"Yesterday."
+
+"I expect he means to-morrow," said King. With the advantage of
+looker-on and a very deep experience of Northerners, he had noted that
+Ismail was lying and that Saunders was growing doubtful, although both
+men concealed the truth with what was very close to being art.
+
+"I have a telegram here," he said, "that says she is in Delhi!"
+
+He patted his coat, where the inner pocket bulged.
+
+"Nay, then the tar lies, for I saw her go with these two eyes of mine!"
+
+"It is not wise to lie to me, my friend," King assured him, so
+pleasantly that none could doubt he was telling truth.
+
+"If I lie may I eat dirt!" Ismail answered him.
+
+Inches lent the Afridi dignity, but dignity has often been used as a
+stalking horse for untruth. King nodded, and it was not possible to
+judge by his expression whether he believed or not.
+
+"Let's make a move," he said, turning to Saunders. "She seems at
+any rate to wish it believed she has gone North. I can't stay here
+indefinitely. If she's here she's on the watch here, and there's no need
+of me. If she has gone North, then that is where the kites are wheeling!
+I'll take the early morning train. Where are the prisoners?"
+
+"In the old Mir Khan Palace. We were short of jail room and had to
+improvise. The horse-stalls there have come in handy more than once
+before. Shall we take this gharry?"
+
+With Ismail up beside the driver nursing King's bag and looking like
+a great grim vulture about to eat the horse, they drove back through
+swarming streets in the direction of the river. King seemed to have lost
+all interest in crowds. He scarcely even troubled to watch when they
+were held up at a cross-roads by a marching regiment that tramped as if
+it were herald of the Last Trump, with bayonets glistening in the street
+lights. He sat staring ahead in silence, although Saunders made more
+than one effort to engage him in conversation.
+
+"No!" he said at last suddenly--so that Saunders jumped.
+
+"No what?"
+
+"No need to stay here. I've got what I came for!"
+
+"What was that?" asked Saunders, but King was silent again. Conscious of
+the unaccustomed weight on his left wrist, he moved his arm so that the
+sleeve drew and he could see the edge of the great gold bracelet Rewa
+Gunga had given him in Yasmini's name.
+
+"Know anything of Rewa Gunga?" he asked suddenly again.
+
+"The Rangar?"
+
+"Yes, the Rangar. Yasmini's man."
+
+"Not much. I've seen him. I've spoken with him, and I've had to stand
+impudence from him--twice. I've been tipped off more than once to let
+him alone because he's her man. He does ticklish errands for her, or so
+they say. He's what you might call 'known to the police' all right."
+
+They began to approach an age-old palace near the river, and Saunders
+whispered a pass-word when an armed guard halted them. They were halted
+again at a gloomy gateway where an officer came out to look them over;
+by his leave they left the gharry and followed him under the arch
+until their heels rang on stone paving in a big ill-lighted courtyard
+surrounded by high walls.
+
+There, after a little talk, they left Ismail squatting beside King's
+bag, and Saunders led the way through a modern iron door, into what had
+once been a royal prince's stables.
+
+In gloom that was only thrown into contrast by a wide-spaced row of
+electric lights, a long line of barred and locked converted horse-stalls
+ran down one side of a lean-to building. The upper half of each locked
+door was a grating of steel rods, so that there was some ventilation for
+the prisoners; but very little light filtered between the bars, and all
+that King could see of the men within was the whites of their eyes. And
+they did not look friendly.
+
+He had to pass between them and the light, and they could see more of
+him than he could of them. At the first cell he raised his left hand and
+made the gold bracelet on his wrist clink against the steel bars.
+
+A moment later be cursed himself, and felt the bracelet with his
+fingernail. He had made a deep nick in the soft gold. A second later yet
+he smiled.
+
+"May God be with thee!" boomed a prisoner's voice in Pashtu.
+
+"Didn't know that fellow was handcuffed," said Saunders. "Did you hear
+the ring? They should have been taken off. Leaving his irons on has made
+him polite, though."
+
+He passed oil, and King followed him, saying nothing. But at the next
+cell he repeated what he had done at the first, taking better care of
+the gold but letting his wrist stay longer in the light.
+
+"May God be with thee!" said a voice within.
+
+"Gettin' a shade less arrogant, what?" said Saunders.
+
+"May God be with thee!" said a man in the third stall as King passed.
+
+"They seem to be anxious for your morals!" laughed Saunders, keeping a
+pace or two ahead to do the honors of the place.
+
+"May God be with thee!" said a fourth man, and King desisted for the
+present, because Saunders looked as if he were growing inquisitive.
+
+"Where did you arrest them?" he asked when Saunders came to a stand
+under a light.
+
+"All in one place. At Ali's."
+
+"Who and what is Ali?"
+
+"Pimp--crimp--procurer--Prussian spy and any other evil thing that takes
+his fancy! Runs a combination gambling hell and boarding house. Lets
+'em run into debt and blackmails 'em. Ali's in the kaiser's pay--that's
+known! 'Musing thing about it is he keeps a photo of Wilhelm in his
+pocket and tries to make himself believe the kaiser knows him by name.
+Suffers from swelled head, which is part of their plan, of course.
+We'll get him when we want him, but at present he's useful 'as is' for
+a decoy. Ali was very much upset at the arrest--asked in the name of
+Heaven--seems to be familiar with God, too, and all the angels!--how he
+shall collect all the money these men owe him!"
+
+"You wouldn't call these men prosperous, then?"
+
+"Not exactly! Ali is the only spy out of the North who prospers much at
+present, and even he gets most of his money out of his private business.
+Why, man, the real Germans we have pounced on are all as poor as church
+mice. That's another part of the plan, of course, which is sweet in all
+its workings. They're paid less than driven by threats of exposure to
+us--comes cheaper, and serves to ginger up the spies! The Germans pay
+Ali a little, and he traps the Hillmen when they come South--lets
+'em gamble--gets 'em into debt--plays on their fear of jail and their
+ignorance of the Indian Penal Code, which altereth every afternoon--and
+spends a lot of time telling 'em stories to take back with 'em to the
+Hills when they can get away. They can get away when they've paid him
+what they owe. He makes that clear, and of course that's the fly in the
+amber. Yasmini sends and pays their board and gambling debts, and she's
+our man, so to speak. When they get back to the 'Hills'--"
+
+"Thanks," said King, "I know what happens in the 'Hills. Tell me about
+the Delhi end of it."
+
+"Well, when the wander-fever grabs 'em again they come down once more
+from their 'Hills' to drink and gamble,--and first they go to Yasmini's.
+But she won't let 'em drink at her place. Have to give her credit for
+that, y'know; her place has never been a stews. Sooner or later they
+grow tired of virtue, 'specially with so much intrigue goin' on under
+their noses, and back they all drift to Ali's and tell him tales to
+tell the Germans--and the round begins again. Yasmini coaxes all their
+stories out of 'em and primes 'em with a few extra good ones into the
+bargain. Everybody's fooled--'specially the Germans--and exceptin', of
+course, Yasmini and the Raj. Nobody ever fooled that woman, nor ever
+will if my belief goes for anything!"
+
+"Sounds simple!" said King.
+
+"Simple and sordid!" agreed Saunders.
+
+King looked up and down the line of locked doors and then straight into
+Saunders' eyes in a friendly, yet rather disconcerting way. One could
+not judge whether he were laughing or just thinking.
+
+"D'you suppose it's as simple as all that?"
+
+"How d'you mean?"
+
+"D'you suppose the Germans aren't in director touch with the tribes?"
+
+"Why should they be? The simpler the better, I expect, from their point
+of view; and the cheaper the better, too!"
+
+"Um-m-m!" King rubbed his chin. "On what charge did you get these men?"
+
+"Defense of the Realm--suspicious characters--charge to be entered
+later."
+
+"Good! That's simple at all events! Know anything of my man Ismail?"
+
+"Sure! He's one of Yasmini's pets. She bailed him out of Ali's three
+years ago and he worships her. It was he who broke the leg and ribs of
+a pup-rajah a month or two ago for putting on too much dog in her
+reception room! He's Ursus out of Quo Vadis! He's dog, desperado,
+stalking horse and Keeper of the Queen's secrets!"
+
+"Then why d'you suppose she passed him along to me?" asked King.
+
+"Dunno! This is your little mystery, not mine!"
+
+"Glad you appreciate that! Do me a favor, will you?"
+
+"Anything in reason."
+
+"Get the keys to all these cells--send 'em in here to me by Ismail--and
+leave me in here alone!"
+
+Saunders whistled and wiped sweat from his glistening face, for in spite
+of windows open to the courtyard it was hotter than a furnace room.
+
+"Mayn't I have you thrown into a den of tigers?" he asked. "Or a nest
+of cobras? Or get the fiery furnace ready? You'll find 'em sore--and
+dangerous! That man at the end with handcuffs on has probably been
+violent! That 'God be with thee' stuff is habit--they say it with
+unction before they knife a man!"
+
+"I'll be careful, then," King chuckled; and it is a fact that few men
+can argue with him when he laughs quietly in that way. "Send me in the
+keys, like a good chap."
+
+So Saunders went, glad enough to get into the outer air. He slammed
+the great iron door behind him as if he were glad, too, to disassociate
+himself from King and all foolishness. Like many another first-class
+man, King sheds friends as a cat sheds fur going under a gate. They grow
+again and quit again and don't seem to make much difference.
+
+The instant the door slammed King continued down the line with his left
+wrist held high so that the occupant of each cell in turn could see the
+bracelet.
+
+"May God be with thee!" came the instant greeting from each cell until
+down toward the farther end. The occupants of the last six cells were
+silent.
+
+Numbers had been chalked roughly on the doors. With wetted fingers he
+rubbed out the chalk marks on the last six doors, and he had scarcely
+finished doing that when Ismail strode in, slamming the great iron door
+behind him, jangling a bunch of keys and looking more than ever like
+somebody out of the Old Testament.
+
+"Open every door except those whose numbers I have rubbed out!" King
+ordered him.
+
+Ismail proceeded to obey as if that were the least improbable order
+in all the world. It took him two minutes to select the pass-key and
+determine how it worked, then the doors flew open one after another in
+quick succession.
+
+"Come out!" he growled. "Come out!--Come out!" although King had not
+ordered that.
+
+King went and stood under the center light with his left arm bared. The
+prisoners, emerging like dead men out of tombs, blinked at the bright
+light--saw him--then the bracelet--and saluted.
+
+"May God be with thee!" growled each of them.
+
+They stood still then, awaiting fresh developments. It did not seem
+to occur to any one of them as strange that a British officer in khaki
+uniform should be sporting Yasmini's talisman; the thing was apparently
+sufficient explanation in itself.
+
+"Ye all know this?" he asked, holding up his wrist. "Whose is this?"
+
+"Hers!"
+
+The answer was monosyllabic and instant from all thirty throats. "May
+Allah guard her, sleeping and awake!" added one or two of them.
+
+King lit a cheroot and made mental note of the wisdom of referring to
+her by pronoun, not by name.
+
+"And I? Who am I?" he asked, since it saves worlds of trouble to have
+the other side state the case. The Secret Service was not designed for
+giving information, but discovering it.
+
+"Her messenger! Who else? Thou art he who shall take us to the 'Hills'!
+She promised!"
+
+"How did she know ye were in this jail?" he asked them, and one of the
+Hillmen laughed like a jackal, showing yellow eye-teeth. The others
+cackled in chorus after him.
+
+"Answer that riddle thyself--or else ask her! Who are we? Bats, that can
+see in the night? Spirits, who can hear through walls? Nay, we be plain
+men of the mountains!"
+
+"But where were ye when she promised?"
+
+"At Ali's. All of us at Ali's--held for debt. We sent and begged of her.
+She sent word back by a woman that one of the sirkar's men shall free us
+and send us home. So we waited, eating shame and little else, at Ali's.
+At last came a sahib in a great rage, who ordered irons put on our
+wrists and us marched hither. Only when each was pushed into a separate
+cell were the irons taken off again. Yet we were patient, for we knew
+this is part of her cunning, to get us away from Ali without paying him.
+'May Ali die of want,' said we, with one voice all together in these
+cells! And now we be ready! They fed us before we had been in here an
+hour. Our bellies be full, but we be hungry for the 'Hills'!"
+
+King thought of the gold-hilted knife, that still rested under his
+shirt. He was tempted to show it to them and find out surely whose
+it was and what it meant. But wisdom and curiosity seldom mingle. He
+thought of Ismail--"Ursus, of Quo Vadis--dog, desperado, stalking-horse
+and Keeper of the Queen's secrets." It was not time yet to run risks
+with Ismail. The knife stayed where it was.
+
+"I shall start for the Hills at dawn," he said slowly, and he watched
+their eyes gleam at the news. No caged tiger is as wretched as a
+prisoned Hillman. No freed bird wings more wildly for the open. No moth
+comes more foolishly back to the flame again. It was easy to take pity
+on them--probably not one of whom knew pity's meaning.
+
+"Is there any among you who would care to come--?"
+
+"Ah-h-h-h!"
+
+"--at the price of strict obedience?"
+
+"Eh-h-h-h-h!"
+
+It seemed there was no word in Pashtu that could express their
+willingness.
+
+"We be very, very weary for our Hills!" explained the nearest man.
+
+"Aye!" King answered. "And ye all owe Ali!"
+
+"Uh-h-h-h-h!"
+
+But he knew better than to browbeat them on that account just then, for
+the men of the North are easier led than driven--up to a certain point.
+Yet it is no bad plan to remind them of the fundamentals to begin with.
+
+"Will ye obey me, and him?" he asked, laying his hand on Ismail's
+shoulder, as much to let them see the bracelet again as for any other
+reason.
+
+"Aye! If we fail, Allah do more to us!"
+
+King laughed. "Ye shall leave this place as my prisoners. Here ye have
+no friends. Here ye must obey. But what when ye come to your 'Hills' at
+last? Can one man hold thirty men prisoners then? In the 'Hills' will ye
+still obey me?"
+
+They answered him in chorus. Every man of the thirty, and Ismail into
+the bargain, threw his right hand in the air.
+
+"Allah witness that we will obey!"
+
+"Ah-h-h!" said King. "I have heard Hillmen swear by Allah many a time!
+Many a time!"
+
+The answer to that was unexpected. Ismail knelt--seized his hand--and
+pressed the gold bracelet to his lips!
+
+In turn, every one of them filed by, knelt reverently and kissed the
+bracelet!
+
+"Saw ye ever a Hillman do that before?" asked Ismail. "They will obey
+thee! Have no fear!"
+
+"Kutch dar nahin hai!" King answered. "There is no such thing as fear!"
+and Ismail grinned at him, not knowing that King was feeling as Aladdin
+must have done.
+
+"I have heard you swear," said King; "be ye true men!"
+
+"Ah-h-h!"
+
+"Have they belongings that ought to be collected first?" he asked, and
+Ismail laughed.
+
+"No more than the dead have! A shroud apiece! Ali gave them bitterness
+to eat and picked their teeth afterward for gleanings! They stand in
+what they own!"
+
+"Then, come!" ordered King, turning his back confidently on thirty
+savages whom Saunders, for instance, would have preferred to drive in
+front of him, after first seeing them handcuffed. But when he is not
+pressed for time neither pistols, nor yet handcuffs, are included in
+King's method.
+
+"Each lock has a key, but some keys fit all locks," says the Eastern
+proverb. King has been chosen for many ticklish errands in his time, and
+Saunders is still in Delhi.
+
+Through the great iron door into dim outer darkness King led them and
+presently made them squat in a close-huddled semicircle on the paving
+stones, like night-birds waiting for a meal.
+
+"I want blankets for them--two good ones apiece--and food for a week's
+journey!" he told the astonished Saunders; and he spoke so decidedly
+that the other man's questions and argument died stillborn. "While you
+attend to that for me, I'll be seeing his dibs and making explanations.
+You look full of news. What do you know?"
+
+"I've telephoned all the other stations, and my men swear Yasmini has
+not left Delhi by train!"
+
+King smiled at him.
+
+"If I leave by train d'you suppose she'll hear of it?"
+
+"You bet! Bet your boots! Man alive--if she's interested in you by so
+much,"--he measured off a fraction of his little finger end--"she knows
+your next two moves ahead, to say nothing of your past half-dozen!
+I crossed her bows once and thought I had her at a disadvantage. She
+laughed at me. On my honor, my spine tingles yet at the mere thought of
+it! You've never met her? Never heard her laugh? Never seen her eyes?
+You've a treat in store for you--and a mauvais quat' d'heure! What'll
+you bet me she doesn't laugh you out of countenance the very first time
+you meet? Come now--what'll you bet?"
+
+"Not in the habit," King answered, glancing at his watch. "Will you see
+about their rations, please, and the blankets? Thanks!"
+
+They went then in opposite directions and the prisoners were left
+squatting under the eyes and bayonets of a very suspicious prison guard,
+who made no secret of being ready for all conceivable emergencies. One
+enthusiast drew the cartridge out of his breech-chamber and licked it at
+intervals of a minute or two, to the very great interest of the Hillmen,
+who memorized every detail that by any stretch of imagination might be
+expected to improve their own shooting when they should get home again.
+
+King found his way on foot through a maze of streets to a palace where
+he was admitted through one door after another by sentries who saluted
+when he had whispered to them. He ended by sitting on the end of the bed
+of a gray-headed man who owns three titles and whose word is law between
+the borders of a province. To him he talked as one schoolboy to a bigger
+one, because the gray-haired man had understanding, and hence sympathy.
+
+"I don't envy you!" said he under the sheet. "There was an American
+here not long ago--most amusing man I ever talked to. He had the right
+expression. 'I do not desiderate that pie!' was his way of putting it.
+Good, don't you think?"
+
+All the while he talked the older man was writing on a pad that he held
+propped by his knees beneath the bedclothes, holding the paper tight to
+keep it from fluttering in the breeze of a big electric fan.
+
+"There's the release for your prisoners. Take it--and take them!
+Whatever possessed you to want such a gift?"
+
+"Orders, sir."
+
+"Whose?"
+
+"His. He sent for me to Peshawur and gave me strict orders to work with,
+not against her. This was obvious."
+
+"How obvious? It seems bewildering!"
+
+"Well, sir,--first place, she doesn't want to seem to be connected with
+me. Otherwise she'd have been more in evidence. Second place, she has
+left Delhi--his telegram and Saunders' men on oath notwithstanding--and
+she did not mean to leave those men. I imagine her best way to manage
+Hillmen is to keep promises, and they say she promised them. Third
+place, if those thirty men had been anything but her particular pet
+gang they'd either have been over the border or else in jail before
+now,--just like all the others. For some reason that I don't pretend to
+understand, she promised 'em more than she has been able to perform. So
+I provide performance. She gets the credit for it. I get a pretty good
+personal following at least as far as up the Khyber! Q.E.D.,sir!"
+
+The man in bed nodded. "Not bad," he said.
+
+"Didn't she make some effort to get those men away from Ali's?" King
+asked him. "I mean, didn't she try to get them dry-nursed by the sirkar
+in some way?"
+
+"Yes. She did. But it was difficult. In the first place, there didn't
+seem to be any particular hurry. They were eating Ali's substance. The
+scoundrel had to feed them as long as he kept them there, and we wanted
+that. We forbade her to pay their debts to Ali, because he has too
+urgent need of money just now. He is being pressed on account of debts
+of his own, and the pressure is making him take risks. He has been
+begging for money from the German agents. We know who they are, and we
+expect to make a big haul within a few hours now."
+
+"Hope I didn't spoil things by butting in, sir."
+
+"No. This is different. She wanted them arrested and locked up at a
+moment when the jails were all crowded. And then she wanted us to put
+'em into trucks and railroad 'em up North out of harm's way as she put
+it, and we happened to be too busy. The railway staff was overworked.
+Now things are getting straightened out. I felt it keenly not being able
+to oblige her, but she asked too much at the wrong moment! I would have
+done it if I could out of gratitude; it was she who tipped off for us
+most of the really dangerous men, and it was not her fault a few of them
+escaped. But we've all been working both tides under, King. Take me;
+this is my first night in bed in three, and here I am awake! No--nothing
+personal--glad to see you, but please understand. And I'm a leisured
+dilettante compared to most of the others. She must have known our fix.
+She shouldn't have asked."
+
+King smiled. "Perfectly good opportunity for me, sir!" he said
+cheerfully.
+
+"So you seem to think. But look out for that woman, King--she's
+dangerous. She's got the brains of Asia coupled with Western energy! I
+think she's on our side, and I know he believes it; but watch her!"
+
+"Ham dekta hai!" King grinned. But the older man continued to look as if
+he pitied him.
+
+"If you get through alive, come and tell me about it afterward. Now,
+mind you do! I'm awfully interested, but as for envying you--"
+
+"Envy!" King almost squealed. He made the bed-springs rattle as he
+jumped. "I wouldn't swap jobs with General French, sir!"
+
+"Nor with me, I suppose!"
+
+"Nor with you, sir.
+
+"Good-by, then. Good-by, King, my boy. Good-by, Athelstan. Your
+brother's up the Khyber, isn't he? Give him my regards. Good-by!"
+
+Long before dawn the thirty prisoners and Ismail squatted in a little
+herd on the up-platform of a railway station, shepherded by King, who
+smoked a cheroot some twenty paces away, sitting on an unmarked chest of
+medicines. He seemed absorbed in a book on surgery that he had borrowed
+from a chance-met acquaintance in the go-down where he drew the medical
+supplies. Ismail sat on the one trunk that had been fetched from
+the other station and nursed the new hand-bag on his knees, picking
+everlastingly at the lock and wondering audibly what the bag contained
+to an accompaniment of low-growled sympathy.
+
+"I am his servant--for she said so--and he said so. As the custom is he
+gave me the key of the great bag--on which I sit--as he said himself,
+for safe-keeping. Then why--why in Allah's name--am I not to have the
+key of this bag too? Of this little bag that holds so little and is so
+light?"
+
+"It might be money in it?" hazarded one of the herd.
+
+"Nay, for that it is too light."
+
+"Paper money!" suggested another man. "Hundies, with printing on the
+face that sahibs accept instead of gold."
+
+"Nay, I know where his money is," said Ismail. "He has but little with
+him."
+
+"A razor would slit the leather easily," suggested another man. "Then
+with a hand inserted carefully through the slit, so as not to widen it
+more than needful, a man could soon discover the contents. And later,
+the bag might be dropped or pushed violently against some sharp thing,
+to explain the cut."
+
+Ismail shook his head.
+
+"Why? What could he do to thee?"
+
+"It is because I know not what he would do to me that I will do
+nothing!" answered Ismail. "He is not at all like other sahibs I have
+had dealings with. This man does unexpected things. This man is not mad,
+he has a devil. I have it in my heart to love this man. But such talk is
+foolishness. We are all her men!"
+
+"Aye! We are her men!" came the chorus, so that King looked up and
+watched them over the open book.
+
+At dawn, when the train pulled out, the thirty prisoners sat safely
+locked in third-class compartments. King lay lazily on the cushions of a
+first-class carriage in the rear, utterly absorbed in the principles of
+antiseptic dressing, as if that had anything to do with Prussians and
+the Khyber Pass; and Ismail attended to the careful packing of soda
+water bottles in the ice-box on the floor.
+
+"Shall I open the little bag, sahib?" he asked.
+
+King shook his head.
+
+Ismail shook the bag.
+
+"The sound is as of things of much importance all disordered," he said
+sagely. "It might be well to rearrange."
+
+"Put it over there!" King ordered. "Set it down!"
+
+Ismail obeyed and King laid his book down to light another of his black
+cheroots. The theme of antiseptics ceased to exercise its charm over
+him. He peeled off his tunic, changed his shirt and lay back in sweet
+contentment. Headed for the "Hills," who would not be contented, who had
+been born in their very shadow?--in their shadow, of a line of Britons
+who have all been buried there!
+
+"The day after to-morrow I'll see snow!" he promised himself. And
+Ismail, grinning with yellow teeth through a gap in his wayward beard,
+understood and sympathized.
+
+Forward in the third-class carriages the prisoners hugged themselves and
+crooned as they met old landmarks and recognized the changing scenery.
+There was a new cleaner tang in the hot wind that spoke of the "Hills"
+and home!
+
+Delhi had drawn them as Monte Carlo attracts the gamblers of all Europe.
+But Delhi had spewed them out again, and oh! how exquisite the promise
+of the "Hills" was, and the thunder of the train that hurried--the
+bumping wheels that sang Himahlayas--Himahlyas!--the air that blew in on
+them unscented--the reawakened memory--the heart's desire for the cold
+and the snow and the cruelty--the dark nights and the shrieking storms
+and the savagery of the Land of the Knife ahead!
+
+The journey to Peshawur, that ought to have been wearisome because
+they were everlastingly shunted into sidings to make way for roaring
+south-bound troop trains and kept waiting at every wayside station
+because the trains ahead of them were blocked three deep, was no less
+than a jubilee progress!
+
+Not a packed-in regiment went by that was not howled at by King's
+prisoners as if they were blood-brothers of every man in it. Many an
+officer whom King knew waved to him from a passing train.
+
+"Meet you in Berlin!" was a favorite greeting. And after that they would
+shout to him for news and be gone before King could answer.
+
+Many a man, at stations where the sidings were all full and nothing
+less than miracles seemed able to release the wedged-in trains, came
+and paced up and down a platform side by side with King. From them he
+received opinions, but no sympathy to speak of.
+
+"Got to stay in India? Hard lines!" Then the conversation would be
+bluntly changed, for in the height of one's enthusiasm it is not decent
+to hurt another fellow's feelings. Simple, simple as a little child is
+the clean-clipped British officer. "Look at that babu, now. Don't you
+think he's a marvel? Don't you think the Indian babu's a marvel? Sixty
+a month is more than the beggar gets, and there he goes, doing two
+jobs and straightening out tangled trains into the bargain! Isn't he a
+wonder, King?"
+
+"India's a wonderful country," King would answer, that being one of his
+stock remarks. And to his credit be it written that he never laughed at
+one of them. He let them think they were more fortunate than he, with
+manlier, bloodier work to do.
+
+Peshawur, when they reached it at last, looked dusty and bleak in the
+comfortless light of Northern dawn. But the prisoners crowed and crooned
+it a greeting, and there was not much grumbling when King refused to
+unlock their compartment doors. Having waited thus long, they could
+endure a few more hours in patience, now that they could see and smell
+their "Hills" at last.
+
+And there was the general again, not in a dog-cart this time, but
+furiously driven in a motor-car, roaring and clattering into the station
+less than two minutes after the train arrived. He was out of the car,
+for all his age and weight, before it had come to a stand. He took one
+steady look at King and then at the prisoners before he returned King's
+salute.
+
+"Good!" he said. And then, as if that were not enough: "Excellent! Don't
+let 'em out, though, to chew the rag with people on the platform. Keep
+'em in!"
+
+"They're locked in, sir."
+
+"Excellent! Come and walk up and down with me."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+
+
+     Death roosts in the Khyber while he preens his wings!
+     --Native Proverb
+
+
+"Seen her?" asked the general, with his hands behind him.
+
+"No," said King, looking sharply sidewise at him and walking stride for
+stride. His hands were behind him, too, and one of them covered the gold
+bracelet on his other wrist.
+
+The general looked equally sharply sidewise.
+
+"Nor've I," he said. "She called me up over the phone yesterday to ask
+for facilities for her man Rewa Gunga, and he was in here later. He's
+waiting for you at the foot of the Pass--camped near the fort at Jamrud
+with your bandobast all ready. She's on ahead--wouldn't wait."
+
+King listened in silence, and his prisoners, watching him through the
+barred compartment windows, formed new and golden opinions of him, for
+it is common knowledge in the "Hills" that when a burra sahib speaks
+to a chota sahib, the chota sahib ought to say, "Yes, sir, oh, yes!" at
+very short intervals. Therefore King could not be a chota sahib after
+all. So much the better. The "Hills" ever loved to deal with men in
+authority, just as they ever despised underlings.
+
+"What made you go back for the prisoners?" the general asked. "Who gave
+you that cue?"
+
+"It's a safe rule never to do what the other man expects, sir, and Rewa
+Gunga expected me to travel by his train."
+
+"Was that your only reason?"
+
+"No, sir. I had general reasons. None of 'em specific. Where natives
+have a finger in the pie there's always something left undone at the
+last minute."
+
+"But what made you investigate those prisoners?"
+
+"Couldn't imagine why thirty men should be singled out for special
+treatment. Rewa Gunga told me they were still at large in Delhi.
+Couldn't guess why. Had 'em arrested so's to be able to question 'em.
+That's all, sir."
+
+"Not nearly all!" said the general. "You realize by now, I suppose, that
+they're her special men--special personal following?"
+
+"Guessed something of that sort."
+
+"Well--she's clever. It occurred to her that the safest way to get
+'em up North was to have 'em arrested and deported. That would avoid
+interference and delay and would give her a chance to act deliverer at
+this end, and so make 'em grateful to her--you see? Rewa Gunga told me
+all this, you understand. He seems to think she's semi-divine. He was
+full of her cleverness in having thought of letting 'em all get into
+debt at a house of ill repute, so as to have 'em at hand when she wanted
+'em."
+
+"She must have learned that trick from our merchant marine," said King.
+
+"Maybe. She's clever. She asked me over the phone whether her thirty men
+had started North. I sent a telegram in cypher to find out. The answer
+was that you had found 'em and rounded 'em up and were bringing 'em with
+you. When she called me up on the phone the second time I told her so,
+and I heard her chuckle with delight. So I emphasized the point of your
+having discovered 'em and saved 'em every wit whole and all that kind of
+thing. I asked her to come and see me, but she wouldn't,--said she was
+'disguised and particularly did not want to be recognized, which
+was reasonable enough. She sent Rewa Gunga instead. Now, this seems
+important:
+
+"Before I sent you down to Delhi--before I sent for you at all--I told
+her what I meant to do, and I never in my life knew a woman raise such
+terrific objections to working with a man. As it happened her objections
+only confirmed my determination to send for you, and before she went
+down to Delhi to clean up I told her flatly she would either have to
+work with you or else stay in India for the duration of the war."
+
+The general did not notice that King was licking his lips. Nor, if
+he had noticed King's hand that now was in front of him pressing on
+something under his shirt, could he have guessed that the something
+was a gold-hilted knife with a bronze blade. King grunted in token of
+attention, and the general continued.
+
+"She gave in finally, but I felt nervous about it. Now, without your
+getting sight of her--you say you haven't seen her?--her whole attitude
+has changed! What have you done? Bringing up her thirty men seems a
+little enough thing. Yet, she swears by you! Used to swear at you, and
+now says you're the only officer in the British army with enough brains
+to fill a helmet! Says she wouldn't go up the Khyber without you! Says
+you're indispensable! Sent Rewa Gunga round to me with orders to
+make sure I don't change my mind about you! What have you done to
+her--bewitched her?"
+
+"Done nothing," said King.
+
+"Well, keep on doing nothing in the same style and the world shall
+render you its best jobs, one after the other, in sequence! You've made
+a good beginning!"
+
+"Know anything of Rewa Gunga, sir?"
+
+"Nothing, except that he's her man. She trusts him, so we've got to, and
+you've got to take him up the Khyber with you. What she orders, he'll
+do, or you may take it from me she would never have left him behind.
+As long as she is on our side you will be pretty safe in trusting Rewa
+Gunga. And she has got to be on our side. Got to be! She's the only key
+we've got to Khinjan, and hell is brewing there this minute! She dare
+unlock the gates and ride the devil down the Khyber if she thought it
+worth her while! You're to go up the Khyber after her to convince her
+that there are better mounts than the devil and better fun than playing
+with hell-fire! The Rangar told me he had given you her passport--that
+right?"
+
+As they turned at the end of the platform King bared his wrist and
+showed the gold bracelet.
+
+"Good!" said the general, but King thought his face clouded. "That thing
+is worth more than a hundred men. Jack Allison wore that same bracelet,
+unless I'm much mistaken, on his way down in disguise from Bukhara. So
+did another man we both knew; but he died. Be sure not to forget to give
+it back to her when the show's over, King."
+
+King nodded and grunted. "What's the news from Khinjan, sir?"
+
+"Nothing specific, except that the place is filling up. You remember
+what I told you about the 'Heart of the Hills' being in Khinjan? Well,
+they say now that the 'Heart of the Hills' has been awake for a long
+time, and that when the heart stirs the body does not lie quiet long. No
+use trying to guess what they mean; go and find out. And remember--the
+whole armed force at my disposal in this Province isn't more than enough
+to tempt the tribes to conclusions! It's a case for diplomacy. It's a
+case where diplomacy must not fail."
+
+King said nothing, but the chin-strap mark on his cheek and chin grew
+slightly whiter, as it always does under the stress of emotion. He
+can not control it, and he has dyed it more than once on the eve of
+happenings, there being no more wisdom in wearing feelings on one's face
+than on a sleeve.
+
+"Here comes your engine," said the general. "Well--there are two
+battalions of Khyber Rifles up the Pass and they're about at full
+strength. They've got word already that you are gazetted to them.
+They'll expect you. By the way, you've a brother in the K.R., haven't
+you?"
+
+"At Ali Masjid, sir."
+
+"Give him my regards when you see him, will you?"
+
+"Thank you, sir."
+
+"There's your engine whistling. You'd better hurry, Good-by, my boy. Get
+word to me whenever possible. Good luck to you! Regards to your brother!
+Good-by!"
+
+King saluted and stood watching while the general hurried to the waiting
+motor-car. When the car whirled away in a din of dust he returned
+leisurely to the train that had been shortened to three coaches. Then he
+gave the signal to start up the spur-track, that leads to Jamrud, where
+a fort cowers in the very throat of the dreadfulest gorge in Asia--the
+Khyber Pass.
+
+It was not a long journey, nor a very slow one, for there was nothing to
+block the way except occasional men with flags, who guarded culverts
+and little bridges. The Germans would know better than to waste time or
+effort on blowing up that track, but there might be Northern gentlemen
+at large, out to do damage for the sport of it, and the sepoys all along
+the line were posted in twos, and awake.
+
+It was low-tide under the Himalayas. The flood that was draining India
+of her armed men had left Jamrud high and dry with a little nondescript
+force stranded there, as it were, under a British major and some native
+officers. There were no more pomp and circumstance; no more of the
+reassuring thunder of gathering regiments, nor for that matter any more
+of that unarmed native helplessness that so stiffens the backs of the
+official English.
+
+Frowning over Jamrud were the lean "Hills," peopled by the fiercest
+fighting men on earth, and the clouds that hung over the Khyber's course
+were an accent to the savagery.
+
+But King smiled merrily as he jumped out of the train, and Rewa Gunga,
+who was there to meet him, advanced with outstretched hand and a smile
+that would have melted snow on the distant peaks if he had only looked
+the other way.
+
+"Welcome, King sahib!" he laughed, with the air of a skilled fencer who
+admires another, better one. "I shall know better another time and let
+you keep in front of me! No more getting first into a train and settling
+down for the night! It may not be easy to follow you, and I suspect it
+isn't, but at least it jolly well can't be such a job as leading you! I
+trust you had a comfortable journey?"
+
+"Thanks," said King, shaking hands with him, and then turning away to
+unlock the carriage doors that held his prisoners in. They were baying
+now like wolves to be free, and they surged out, like wolves from a
+cage, to clamor round the Rangar, pawing him and struggling to be first
+to ask him questions.
+
+"Nay, ye mountain people; nay!" he laughed. "I, too, am from the plains!
+What do I know of your families or of your feuds? Am I to be torn to
+pieces to make a meal?"
+
+At that Ismail interfered, with the aid of an ash pick-handle,
+chance-found beside the track.
+
+"Hill-bastards!" he howled at them, beating at them as if they were
+sheaves and his cudgel were a flail. "Sons of nameless mothers!
+Forgotten of God! Shameless! Brood of the evil one! Hands off!"
+
+King had to stop him, not that he feared trouble, for they did not seem
+to resent either abuse or cudgeling in the least--and that in itself was
+food for thought; but broken shoulders are no use for carrying loads.
+
+Laughing as if the whole thing was the greatest joke imaginable, Rewa
+Gunga fell into stride beside King and led him away in the direction of
+some tents.
+
+"She is up the Pass ahead of us," he announced. "She was in the deuce of
+a hurry, I can assure you. She wanted to wait and meet you, but matters
+were too jolly well urgent, and we shall have our bally work cut out to
+catch her, you can bet! But I have everything ready--tents and beds and
+stores--everything!"
+
+King looked over his shoulder to make sure that Ismail was bringing the
+little leather bag along.
+
+"So have I," he said quietly.
+
+"I have horses," said Rewa Gunga, "and mules and--"
+
+"How did she travel up the Khyber?" King asked him, and the Rangar
+spared him a curious sidewise glance.
+
+"On a horse. You should have seen the horse!"
+
+"What escort had she?"
+
+"She?"
+
+Rewa Gunga chuckled and then suddenly grew serious.
+
+"The 'Hills' are her escort, King sahib. She is mistress in the 'Hills.'
+There isn't a murdering ruffian who would not lie down and let her walk
+on him! She rode away alone on a thoroughbred mare and she jolly well
+left me the mare's double on which to follow her. Come and look."
+
+Not far from where the tents had been pitched in a cluster a string of
+horses winnied at a picket rope. King saw the two good horses ready for
+himself, and ten mules beside them that would have done credit to any
+outfit. But at the end of the line, pawing at the trampled grass, was a
+black mare that made his eyes open wide. Once in a hundred years or so
+a viceroy's cup, or a Derby is won by an animal that can stand and look
+and move as that mare did.
+
+"Just watch!" the Rangar boasted; hooking up the bit and throwing off
+the blanket. And as he mounted into the native-made rough-hide saddle
+a shout went up from the fort and native officers and half the soldiery
+came out to watch the poetry of motion.
+
+The mare was not the only one worth watching; her rider shared the
+praise. There was something unexpected, although not in the least
+ungainly, about the Rangar's seat in the saddle that was not the
+ordinary, graceful native balance and yet was full of grace. King
+ascribed the difference to the fact that the Rangar had seen no military
+service, and before the inadequacy of that explanation had asserted
+itself he had already forgotten to criticize in sheer admiration.
+
+There was none of the spurring and back-reining that some native bloods
+of India mistake for horse-manship. The Rangar rode with sympathy and
+most consummate skill, and the result was that the mare behaved as if
+she were part of him, responding to his thoughts, putting a foot where
+he wished her to put it and showing her wildest turn of speed along a
+level stretch in instant response to his mood.
+
+"Never saw anything better," King admitted ungrudgingly, as the mare
+came back at a walk to her picket rope.
+
+"There is only one mare like this one," laughed the Rangar. "She has
+her."
+
+"What'll you take for this one?" King asked him. "Name your price!"
+
+"The mare is hers. You must ask her. Who knows? She is generous. There
+is nobody on earth more generous than she when she cares to be. See what
+you wear on your wrist!"
+
+"That is a loan," said King, uncovering the bracelet. "I shall give it
+back to her when we meet."
+
+"See what she says when you meet!" laughed the Rangar, taking a
+cigarette from his jeweled case with an air and smiling as he lighted
+it. "There is your tent, sahib."
+
+He motioned with the cigarette toward a tent pitched quite a hundred
+yards away from the others and from the Rangar's own; with the Rangar's
+and the cluster of tents for the men it made an equilateral triangle, so
+that both he and the Rangar had privacy.
+
+With a nod of dismissal, King walked over to inspect the bandobast, and
+finding it much more extravagant than he would have dreamed of providing
+for himself, he lit one of his black cheroots, and with hands clasped
+behind him strolled over to the fort to interview Courtenay, the officer
+commanding.
+
+It so happened that Courtenay had gone up the Pass that morning with
+his shotgun after quail. He came back into view, followed by his little
+ten-man escort just as King neared the fort, and King timed his approach
+so as to meet him. The men of the escort were heavily burdened; he could
+see that from a distance.
+
+"Hello!" he said by the fort gate, cheerily, after he had saluted and
+the salute had been returned.
+
+"Oh, hello, King! Glad to see you. Heard you were coming, of course.
+Anything I can do?"
+
+"Tell me anything you know," said King, offering him a cheroot which the
+other accepted. As he bit off the end they stood facing each other, so
+that King could see the oncoming escort and what it carried. Courtenay
+read his eyes.
+
+"Two of my men!" he said. "Found 'em up the Pass. Gazi work I think.
+They were cut all to pieces. There's a big lashkar gathering somewhere
+in the 'Hills,' and it might have been done by their skirmishers, but I
+don't think so."
+
+"A lashkar besides the crowd at Khinjan?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Who's supposed to be leading it?"
+
+"Can't find out," said Courtenay. Then he stepped aside to give orders
+to the escort. They carried the dead bodies into the fort.
+
+"Know anything of Yasmini?" King asked, when the major stood in front of
+him again.
+
+"By reputation, of course, yes. Famous person--sings like a
+bulbul--dances like the devil--lived in Delhi--mean her?"
+
+King nodded. "When did she start up the Pass?" he asked.
+
+"How d'ye mean?" Courtenay demanded sharply.
+
+"To-day or yesterday?"
+
+"She didn't start! I know who goes up and who comes down. Would you care
+to glance over the list?"
+
+"Know anything of Rewa Gunga?" King asked him.
+
+"Not much. Tried to buy his mare. Seen the animal? Gad! I'd give a
+year's pay for that beast! He wouldn't sell and I don't blame him."
+
+"He goes up the Khyber with me," said King. "He's what the Turks would
+call my youldash."
+
+"And the Persians a hamrah, eh? There was an American here lately--merry
+fellow--and I was learning his language. Side partner's the word in
+the States. I can imagine a worse side partner than that same man Rewa
+Gunga--much worse."
+
+"He told me just now," said King, "that Yasmini went up the Pass
+unescorted, mounted on a mare the very dead spit of the black one you
+say you wanted to buy."
+
+Courtenay whistled.
+
+"I'm sorry, King. I'm sorry to say he lied."
+
+"Will you come and listen while I have it out with him?"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+King threw away his less-than-half-consumed cheroot and they started to
+walk together toward King's camp. After a few minutes they arrived at a
+point from which they could see the prisoners lined up in a row facing
+Rewa Gunga. A less experienced eye than King's or Courtenay's could have
+recognized their attitude of reverent obedience.
+
+"He'll make a good adjutant for you, that man," said Courtenay; but King
+only grunted.
+
+At sight of them Ismail left the line and came hurrying toward them with
+long mountainman's strides.
+
+"Tell Rewa Gunga sahib that I wish to speak to him!" King called, and
+Ismail hurried back again.
+
+Within two minutes the Rangar stood facing them, looking more at ease
+than they.
+
+"I was cautioning those savages!" he explained. "They're an escort, but
+they need a reminder of the fact, else they might jolly well imagine
+themselves mountain goats and scatter among the 'Hills'!"
+
+He drew out his wonderful cigarette case and offered it open to
+Courtenay, who hesitated, and then helped himself. King refused.
+
+"Major Courtenay has just told me," said King, "that nobody resembling
+Yasmini has gone up the Pass recently. Can you explain?"
+
+"You see, I've been watching the Pass," explained Courtenay.
+
+The Rangar shook his head, blew smoke through his nose and laughed.
+
+"And you did not see her go?" he said, as if he were very much amused.
+
+"No," said Courtenay. "She didn't go."
+
+"Can you explain?" asked King rather stiffly.
+
+"Do you mean, can I explain why the major failed to see her? 'Pon my
+soul, King sahib, d'you want me to insult the man? Yasmini is too jolly
+clever for me, or for any other man I ever met; and the major's a
+man, isn't he? He may pack the Khyber so full of men that there's only
+standing room and still she'll go up without his leave if she chooses!
+There is nobody like Yasmini in all the world!"
+
+The Rangar was looking past them, facing the great gorge that lets the
+North of Asia trickle down into India and back again when weather and
+the tribes permit. His eyes had become interested in the distance. King
+wondered why--and looked--and saw. Courtenay saw, too.
+
+"Hail that man and bring him here!" he ordered.
+
+Ismail, keeping his distance with ears and eyes peeled, heard instantly
+and hurried off. He went like the wind and all three watched in silence
+for ten minutes while he headed off a man near the mouth of the Pass,
+stopped him, spoke to him and brought him along. Fifteen minutes later
+an Afridi stood scowling in front of them with a little letter in
+a cleft stick in his hand. He held it out and Courtenay took it and
+sniffed.
+
+"Well--I'll be blessed! A note"--sniff--sniff--"on scented paper!"
+Sniff--sniff! "Carried down the Khyber in a split stick! Take it,
+King--it's addressed to you."
+
+King obeyed and sniffed too. It smelt of something far more subtle than
+musk. He recognized the same strange scent that had been wafted from
+behind Yasmini's silken hangings in her room in Delhi. As he unfolded
+the note--it was not sealed--he found time for a swift glance at Rewa
+Gunga's face. The Rangar seemed interested and amused.
+
+        "Dear Captain King," the note ran, in English.  "Kindly
+        be quick to follow me, because there is much talk of a
+        lashkar getting ready for a raid.  I shall wait for
+        you in Khinjan, whither my messenger shall show the way.
+        Please let him keep his rifle.  Trust him, and Rewa
+        Gunga and my thirty whom you brought with you.  The
+        messenger's name is Darya Khan.
+
+                "Your servant,
+
+                        "Ysamini."
+
+He passed the note to Courtenay, who read it and passed it back.
+
+"Are you the messenger who is to show this sahib the road to Khinjan?"
+he asked.
+
+"Aye!"
+
+"But you are one of three who left here and went up the Pass at dawn! I
+recognize you."
+
+"Aye!" said the man. "She met me and gave me this letter and sent me
+back."
+
+"How great is the lashkar that is forming?" asked Courtenay.
+
+"Some say three thousand men. They speak truth. They who say five
+thousand are liars. There is a lashkar."
+
+"And she went up alone?" King murmured aloud in Pashtu.
+
+"Is the moon alone in the sky?" the fellow asked, and King smiled at
+him.
+
+"Let us hurry after her, sahib!" urged Rewa Gunga, and King looked
+straight into his eyes, that were like pools of fire, just as they had
+been that night in the room in Delhi. He nodded and the Rangar grinned.
+
+"Better wait until dawn," advised Courtenay. "The Pass is supposed to be
+closed at dusk."
+
+"I shall have to ask for special permission, sir."
+
+"Granted, of course."
+
+"Then, we'll start at eight to-night!" said King, glancing at his watch
+and snapping the gold case shut.
+
+"Dine with me," said Courtenay.
+
+"Yes, please. Got to pack first. Daren't trust anybody else."
+
+"Very well. We'll dine in my tent at six-thirty," said Courtenay. "So
+long!"
+
+"So long, sir," said King, and each went about his own business, King
+with the Rangar, and Ismail and all thirty prisoners at his heels, and
+Courtenay alone, but that much more determined.
+
+"I'll find out," the major muttered, "how she got up the Pass without my
+knowing it. Somebody's tail shall be twisted for this!"
+
+But he did not find out until King told him, and that was many days
+later, when a terrible cloud no longer threatened India from the North.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+
+
+     Oh, a broken blade,
+     And an empty bag,
+     And a sodden kit,
+     And a foundered nag,
+     And a whimpering wind
+     Are more or less
+     Ground for a gentleman's distress.
+     Yet the blade will cut,
+     (He should swing with a will!)
+     And the emptiest bag
+     He may readiest fill;
+     And the nag will trot
+     If the man has a mind,
+     So the kit he may dry
+     In the whimpering wind.
+     Shades of a gallant past--confess!
+     How many fights were won with less?
+
+
+"I think I envy you!" said Courtenay.
+
+They were seated in Courtenay's tent, face to face across the low table,
+with guttering lights between and Ismail outside the tent handing plates
+and things to Courtenay's servant inside.
+
+"You're about the first who has admitted it," said King.
+
+Not far from them a herd of pack-camels grunted and bubbled after the
+evening meal. The evening breeze brought the smoke of dung fires down
+to them, and an Afghan--one of the little crowd of traders who had come
+down with the camels three hours ago--sang a wailing song about his
+lady-love. Overhead the sky was like black velvet, pierced with silver
+holes.
+
+"You see, you can't call our end of this business war--it's sport,"
+said Courtenay. "Two battalions of Khyber Rifles, hired to hold the Pass
+against their own relations. Against them a couple of hundred thousand
+tribesmen, very hungry for loot, armed with up-to-date rifles, thanks
+to Russia yesterday and Germany to-day, and all perfectly well aware
+that a world war is in progress. That's sport, you know--not the 'image
+and likeness of war' that Jorrocks called it, but the real red root. And
+you've got a mystery thrown in to give it piquancy. I haven't found out
+yet how Yasmini got up the Pass without my knowledge. I thought it was a
+trick. Didn't believe she'd gone. Yet all my mer swear they know she
+has gone, and not one of them will own to having seen her go! What d'you
+think of that?"
+
+"Tell you later," said King, "when I've been in the 'Hills' a while."
+
+"What d'you suppose I'm going to say, eh? Shall I enter in my diary that
+a chit came down the Pass from a woman who never went up it? Or shall I
+say she went up while I was looking the other way?"
+
+"Help yourself!" laughed King.
+
+"Laugh on! I envy you! I f the worst comes to the worst, you'll have
+had the best end of it. If you fail up there in the 'Hills' you'll get
+scoughed and be done with you. You'll at least have had a show. All we
+shall know of your failure will be the arrival of the flood! We'll be
+swamped ingloriously--shot, skinned alive and crucified without a chance
+of doing anything but wait for it! You're in luck--you can move about
+and keep off the fidgets!"
+
+For a while, as he ate Courtenay's broiled quail, King did not answer.
+But the merry smile had left his eyes and he seemed for once to be
+letting his mind dwell on conditions as they concerned himself.
+
+"How many men have you at the fort?" he asked at last.
+
+"Two hundred. Why?"
+
+"All natives?"
+
+"To a man."
+
+        "Like 'em?"
+
+"What's the use of talking?" answered Courtenay. "You know what it means
+when men of an alien race stand up to you and grin when they salute.
+They're my own."
+
+King nodded. "Die with you, eh?"
+
+"To the last man," said Courtenay quietly with that conviction that can
+only be arrived at in one way, and that not the easiest.
+
+"I'd die alone," said King. "It'll be lonely in the 'Hills.' Got any
+more quail?"
+
+And that was all he ever did say on that subject, then or at any other
+time.
+
+"Here's to her!" laughed Courtenay at last, rising and holding up his
+glass. "We can't explain her, so let's drink to her! No heel-taps!
+Here's to Rewa Gunga's mistress, Yasmini!"
+
+"May she show good hunting!" answered King, draining his glass; and it
+was his first that day. "If it weren't for that note of hers that came
+down the Pass, and for one or two other things, I'd almost believe her
+a myth--one of those supposititious people who are supposed to express
+some ideal or other. Not an hallucination, you understand--nor exactly
+an embodied spirit, either. Perhaps the spirit of a problem. Let y be
+the Khyber district, z the tribes, and x the spirit of the rumpus. Find
+x. Get me?"
+
+"Not exactly. Got quinine in your kit, by the way?"
+
+"Plenty, thanks."
+
+"What shall you do first after you get up the Pass? Call on your brother
+at Ali Masjid? He's likely to know a lot by the time you get there."
+
+"Not sure," said King. "May and may not. I'd like to see him. Haven't
+seen the old chap in a donkey's age. How is he?"
+
+"Well two days ago," said Courtenay. "What's your general plan?"
+
+"Hunt!" said King. "Hunt for x and report. Hunt for the spirit of the
+coming ruction and try to scrag it! Live in the open when I can, sleep
+with the lice when it rains or snows, eat dead goat and bad bread, I
+expect; scratch myself when I'm not looking, and take a tub at the first
+opportunity. When you see me on my way back, have a bath made ready for
+me, will you--and keep to windward!"
+
+"Certainly!" said Courtenay. "What's the Rangar going to do with that
+mare of his? Suppose he'll leave her at Ali Masjid? He'll have to leave
+her somewhere on the way. She'll get stolen. Gad! That's the brightest
+notion yet! I'll make a point of buying her from the first horse-thief
+who comes traipsing down the Pass!"
+
+"Here's wishing you luck!" said King. "It's time to go, sir."
+
+He rose, and Courtenay walked with him to where his party waited in the
+dark, chilled by the cold wind whistling down the Khyber. Rewa Gunga
+sat, mounted, at their head, and close to him his personal servant rode
+another horse. Behind them were the mules, and then in a cluster, each
+with a load of some sort on his head, were the thirty prisoners, and
+Ismail took charge of them officiously. Darya Khan, the man who had
+brought the letter down the Pass, kept close to Ismail.
+
+"Are you armed?" King asked, as soon as he could see the whites of the
+Rangar's eyes through the gloom.
+
+"You jolly well bet I am!" the Rangar laughed.
+
+King mounted, and Courtenay shook hands; then he went to Rewa Gunga's
+side and shook hands with him, too.
+
+"Good-by!" called King.
+
+"Good-by and good luck!"
+
+"Forward! March!" King ordered, and the little procession started.
+
+"Oh, men of the 'Hills,' ye look like ghosts--like graveyard ghosts!"
+jeered Courtenay, as they all filed past him. "Ye look like dead men,
+going to be judged!"
+
+Nobody answered. They strode behind the horses, with the swift silent
+strides of men who are going home to the "Hills"; but even they, born in
+the "Hills"' and knowing them as a wolf-pack knows its hunting-ground,
+were awed by the gloom of Khyber-mouth ahead. King's voice was the first
+to break the silence, and he did not speak until Courtenay was out of
+ear-shot. Then:
+
+"Men of the 'Hills'!" he called. "Kuch dar nahin hai!"
+
+"Nahin hai! Hah!" shouted Ismail. "So speaks a man! Hear that, ye
+mountain folk! He says, 'There is no such thing as fear!'"
+
+In his place in the lead, King whistled softly to himself; but he drew
+an automatic pistol from its place beneath his armpit and transferred it
+to a readier position.
+
+Fear or no fear, Khyber-mouth is haunted after dark by the men whose
+blood-feuds are too reeking raw to let them dare go home and for whom
+the British hangman very likely waits a mile or two farther south. It is
+one of the few places in the world where a pistol is better than a thick
+stick.
+
+Boulder, crag and loose rock faded into gloom behind; in front on both
+hands ragged hillsides were beginning to close in; and the wind, whose
+home is in Allah's refuse heap, whistled as it searched busily among
+the black ravines. Then presently the shadow of the thousand-foot-high
+Khyber walls began to cover them, and King drew rein to count them all
+and let them close up. To have let them straggle after that point would
+be tantamount to murder probably.
+
+"Ride last!" he ordered Rewa Gunga. "You've got the only other pistol,
+haven't you?"
+
+Darya Khan, who had brought the letter, had a rifle; so King gave him a
+roving commission on the right flank.
+
+They moved on again after five minutes, in the same deep silence,
+looking like ghosts in search of somebody to ferry them across the Styx.
+Only the glow of King's cheroot, and the lesser, quicker fire of Rewa
+Gunga's cigarette, betrayed humanity, except that once or twice King's
+horse would put a foot wrong and be spoken to.
+
+"Hold up!"
+
+But from five or ten yards away that might have been a new note in the
+gaining wind or even nothing.
+
+After a while King's cheroot went out, and he threw it away. A little
+later Rewa Gunga threw away his cigarette. After that, the veriest
+five-year-old among the Zakka Khels, watching sleepless over the rim of
+some stone watch-tower, could have taken oath that the Khyber's unburied
+dead were prowling in search of empty graves. Probably their uncanny
+silence was their best protection; but Rewa Gunga chose to break it
+after a time.
+
+"King sahib!" he called softly, repeating it louder and more loudly
+until King heard him. "Slowly! Not so fast!"
+
+"Why?"
+
+King did not check speed by a fraction, but the Rangar legged his mare
+into a canter and forced him to pull out to the left of the track and
+make room.
+
+"Because, sahib, there are men among those boulders, and to go too
+fast is to make them think you are afraid! To seem afraid is to invite
+attack! Can we defend ourselves, with three firearms between us? Look!
+What was that?"
+
+They were at the point where the road begins to lead up-hill, westward,
+leaving the bed of a ravine and ascending to join the highway built
+by British engineers. Below, to left and right, was pit-mouth gloom,
+shadows amid shadows, full of eerie whisperings, and King felt the short
+hair on his neck begin to rise.
+
+So he urged his horse forward, because what Rewa Gunga said is true.
+There is only one surer key to trouble in the Khyber than to seem
+afraid--and that is to be afraid. And to have sat his horse there
+listening to the Rangar's whisperings and trying to see through shadows
+would have been to invite fear, of the sort that grows into panic.
+
+The Rangar followed him, close up, and both horse and mare sensed
+excitement. The mare's steel shoes sent up a shower of sparks, and King
+turned to rebuke the Rangar. Yet he did not speak. Never, in all the
+years he had known India and the borderland beyond, had he seen eyes so
+suggestive of a tiger's in the dark! Yet they were not the same color as
+a tiger's, nor the same size, nor the same shape!
+
+"Look, sahib!"
+
+"Look at what?"
+
+"Look!"
+
+After a second or two he caught a glimpse of bluish flame that flashed
+suddenly and died again, somewhere below to the right. Then all at once
+the flame burned brighter and steadier and began to move and to grow.
+
+"Halt!" King thundered; and his voice was as sharp and unexpected as a
+pistol-crack. This was something tangible, that a man could tackle--a
+perfect antidote for nerves.
+
+The blue light continued on a zigzag course, as if a man were running
+among boulders with an unusual sort of torch; and as there was no answer
+King drew his pistol, took about thirty seconds' aim and fired. He fired
+straight at the blue light.
+
+It vanished instantly, into measureless black silence.
+
+"Now you've jolly well done it, haven't you!"' the Rangar laughed in his
+ear. "That was her blue light--Yasmini's!"
+
+It was a minute before King answered, for both animals were all but
+frantic with their sense of their riders' state of mind; it needed
+horsemanship to get them back under control.
+
+"How do you know whose light it was?" King demanded, when the horse and
+mare were head to head again.
+
+"It was prearranged. She promised me a signal at the point where I am to
+leave the track!"
+
+"Where's that guide?" demanded King; and Darya Khan came forward out of
+the night, with his rifle cocked and ready.
+
+"Did she not say Khinjan is the destination?"'
+
+"Aye!" the fellow answered.
+
+"I know the way to Khinjan. That is not it. Get down there and find out
+what that light was. Shout back what you find!"
+
+The man obeyed instantly and sprang down into darkness. But King had
+hardly given the order when shame told him he had sent a native on an
+errand he had no liking for himself.
+
+"Come back!" he shouted. "I'll go."
+
+But the man had gone, slipping noiselessly in the dark from rock to
+rock.
+
+So King drove both spurs home, and set his unwilling horse to scrambling
+downward at an angle he could not guess, into blackness he could feel,
+trusting the animal to find a footing where his own eyes could make out
+nothing.
+
+To his disgust he heard the Rangar follow immediately. To his even
+greater disgust the black mare overtook him. And even then, with his own
+mount stumbling and nearly pitching him headforemost at each lurch, he
+was forced to admire the mare's goatlike agility, for she descended into
+the gorge in running leaps, never setting a wrong foot. When he and his
+horse reached the bottom at last he found the Rangar waiting for him.
+
+"This way, sahib!"
+
+The next he knew sparks from the black mare's heels were kicking up in
+front of him, and a wild ride had begun such as he had never yet dreamed
+of. There was no catching up, for the black mare could gallop two to
+his horse's one; but he set his teeth and followed into solid night,
+trusting ear, eye, guesswork and the God of Secret Service men who loves
+the reckless.
+
+Once in a minute or so he would see a spark, or a shower of them, where
+the mare took a turn in a hurry. Once in every two or three minutes he
+caught sight for a second of the same blue siren light that had started
+the race. He suspected that there were many torches placed at intervals.
+It could not be one man running. More than once it occurred to him to
+draw and shoot, but that thought died into the darkness whence it came.
+Never once while he rode did he forget to admire the Rangar's courage or
+the black mare's speed.
+
+His own horse developed a speed and stamina he had not suspected, and
+probably the Rangar did not dare extend the mare to her limit in the
+dark; at all events, for ten, perhaps fifteen, minutes of breathless
+galloping he almost made a race of it, keeping the Rangar, either within
+sight or sound.
+
+But then the mare swerved suddenly behind a boulder and was gone. He
+spurred round the same great rock a minute later, and was faced by a
+blank wall of shale that brought his horse up all standing. It led
+steep up for a thousand feet to the sky-line. There was not so much as a
+goat-track to show in which direction the mare had gone, nor a sound of
+any kind to guide him.
+
+He dismounted and stumbled about on foot for about ten minutes with his
+eyes two feet from the earth, trying to find some trace of hoof. Then he
+listened, with his ear to the ground. There was no result.
+
+He knew better than to shout, for that would sound like a cry of
+distress, and there is no mercy whatever in the "Hills" for lost
+wanderers, or for men who seem lost. He had not a doubt there were
+men with long jezails lurking not far away, to say nothing of those
+responsible for the blue torchlight.
+
+After some thought be mounted and began to hunt the way back,
+remembering turns and twists with a gift for direction that natives
+might well have envied him. He found his way back to the foot of the
+road at a trot, where ninety-nine men out of almost any hundred would
+have been lost hopelessly; and close to the road he overtook Darya Khan,
+hugging his rifle and staring about like a scorpion at bay.
+
+"Did you expect that blue light, and this galloping away?" he asked.
+
+"Nay, sahib; I knew nothing of it! I was told to lead the way to
+Khinjan."
+
+"Come on, then!"
+
+He set his horse at the boulder-strewn slope and had to dismount to lead
+him at the end of half a minute. At the end of a minute both he and the
+messenger were hauling at the reins and the horse had grown frantic from
+fear of falling backward. He shouted for help, and Ismail and another
+man came leaping down, looking like the devils of the rocks, to lend
+their strength. Ismail tightened his long girdle and stung the other two
+with whiplash words, so that Darya Khan overcame prejudice to the point
+of stowing his rifle between some rocks and lending a hand. Then it took
+all four of them fifteen minutes to heave and haul the struggling animal
+to the level road above.
+
+There, with eyes long grown used to the dark, King stared about him,
+recovering his breath and feeling in his pockets for a fresh cheroot and
+matches. He struck a match and watched it to be sure his hand did not
+shake before he spoke, because one of Cocker's rules is that a man must
+command himself before trying it on others.
+
+"Where are the others?" he asked, when he was certain of himself.
+
+"Gone!" boomed Ismail, still panting, for he had heaved and dragged more
+stoutly than had all the rest together.
+
+King took a dozen pulls at the cheroot and stared about again. In the
+middle of the road stood his second horse, and three mules with his
+baggage, including the unmarked medicine chest. Close to them were
+three men, making the party now only six all told, including Darya Khan,
+himself and Ismail.
+
+"Gone whither?" he asked.
+
+"Whither?"
+
+Ismail's voice was eloquent of shocked surprise.
+
+"They followed! Was it then thy baggage on the other mules? Were they
+thy men? They led the mules and went!"
+
+"Who ordered them?"
+
+"Allah! Need the night be ordered to follow the Day?"
+
+"Who told them whither to go?"
+
+"Who told the moon where the night was?" Ismail answered.
+
+"And thou?"
+
+"I am thy man! She bade me be thy man!"
+
+"And these?"
+
+"Try them!"
+
+King bethought him of his wrist, that was heavy with the weight of gold
+on it. He drew back his sleeve and held it up.
+
+"May God be with thee!" boomed all five men at once, and the Khyber
+night gave back their voices, like the echoing of a well.
+
+King took his reins and mounted.
+
+"What now?" asked Ismail, picking up the leather bag that he regarded as
+his own particular charge.
+
+"Forward!" said King. "Come along!"
+
+He began to set a fairly fast pace, Ismail leading the spare horse and
+the others towing the mules along. Except for King, who was modern and
+out of the picture, they looked like Old Testament patriarchs, hurrying
+out of Egypt, as depicted in the illustrated Bibles of a generation
+ago--all leaning forward--each man carrying a staff--and none looking to
+the right or left.
+
+After a time the moon rose and looked at them from over a distant ridge
+that was thousands of feet higher than the ragged fringe of Khyber wall.
+The little mangy jackals threw up their heads to howl at it; and after
+that there was pale light diffused along the track, and they could
+see so well that King set a faster pace, and they breathed hard in the
+effort to keep up. He did not draw rein until it was nearly time for
+the Pass to begin narrowing and humping upward to the narrow gut at Ali
+Masjid. But then he halted suddenly. The jackals had ceased howling, and
+the very spirit of the Khyber seemed to hold its breath and listen.
+
+In that shuddersome ravine unusual sounds will rattle along sometimes
+from wall to wall and gully to gully, multiplying as they go, until
+night grows full of thunder. So it was now that they heard a staccato
+cannonade--not very loud yet, but so quick, so pulsating, so filling to
+the ears that he could judge nothing about the sound at all, except that
+whatever caused it must be round a corner out of sight.
+
+At first, for a few minutes King suspected it was Rewa Gunga's mare,
+galloping over hard rock away ahead of him. Then he knew it was a horse
+approaching. After that he became nearly sure he was mistaken altogether
+and that the drums were being beaten at a village--until he remembered
+there was no village near enough and no drums in any case.
+
+It was the behavior of the horse he rode, and of the led one and the
+mules, that announced at last beyond all question that a horse was
+coming down the Khyber in a hurry. One of the mules brayed until the
+whole gorge echoed with the insult, and a man hit him hard on the nose
+to silence him.
+
+King legged his horse into the shadow of a great rock. And after
+shepherding the men and mules into another shadow, Ismail came and held
+his stirrup, with the leather bag in the other hand. The bag fascinated
+him, because he did not know what was in it, and it was plain that he
+meant to cling to it until death or King should put an end to curiosity.
+
+King drew his pistol. Ismail drew in his breath with a hissing sound, as
+if he and not King were the marksman. King notched the foresight against
+the corner of a crag, at a height that ought to be an inch or two above
+an oncoming horse's ears, and Ismail nodded sagely. Whoever now should
+gallop round that rock would be obliged to cross the line of fire. Such
+are the vagaries of the Khyber's night echoes that it was a long five
+minutes yet before a man appeared at last, riding like the night wind,
+on a horse that seemed to be very nearly on his last legs. The beast was
+going wildly, sobbing, with straggled ears.
+
+Instead of speaking, King spurred out of the shadow and blocked the
+oncoming horseman's way, making his own horse meet the other shoulder to
+breast, knocking most of the remaining wind out of him. At risk of his
+own life, Ismail seized the man's reins. The sparks flew, and there
+was a growled oath; but the long and the short of it was that the rider
+squinted uncomfortably down the barrel of King's repeating pistol.
+
+"Give an account of yourself!" commanded King.
+
+The man did not answer. He was a jezailchi of the Khyber
+Rifles--hook-nosed as an osprey--black-bearded--with white teeth
+glistening out of a gap in the darkness of his lower face. And he was
+armed with a British government rifle, although that is no criterion
+in that borderland of professional thieves where many a man has offered
+himself for enlistment with a stolen government rifle in his grasp.
+
+The waler he rode was an officer's charger. The poor brute sobbed and
+heaved and sweated in his tracks as his rightful owner surely had never
+made him do.
+
+"Whither?" King demanded.
+
+"Jamrud!"
+
+The jezailchi growled the one-word answer with one eye on King, but the
+other eye still squinted down the pistol barrel warily.
+
+"Have you a letter?"
+
+The man did not answer.
+
+"You may speak to me. I am of your regiment. I am Captain King."
+
+"That is a lie, and a poor one!" the fellow answered. "But a very little
+while ago I spoke with King sahib in Ali Masjid Fort, and he is no
+cappitin, he is leftnant. Therefore thou art a liar twice over--nay,
+three times! Thou art no officer of Khyber Rifles! I am a jezailchi, and
+I know them all!"
+
+"None the less," said King, "I am an officer of the Khyber Rifles, newly
+appointed. I asked you, have you a letter?"
+
+"Aye!"
+
+"Let me see it."
+
+"Nay!"
+
+"I order you!"
+
+"Nay! I am a true man! I will eat the letter rather!"
+
+"Tell me who wrote it, then."
+
+But the fellow shook his head, still eying the pistol as if it were a
+snake about to strike.
+
+"I have eaten the salt!" he said. "May dogs eat me if I break faith! Who
+art thou, to ask me to break faith? An arrficer? That must be a lie!
+The letter is from him who wrote it, to whom I bear it--and that is my
+answer if I die this minute!"
+
+King let his reins fall and raised his left wrist until the moonlight
+glinted on the gold of his bracelet under the jezailchi's very eyes.
+
+"May God be with thee!" said the man at once.
+
+"From whom is your letter, and to whom?" asked King, wondering what the
+men in the clubs at home would say if they knew that a woman's bracelet
+could outweigh authority on British sod; for the Khyber Pass is as much
+British as the air is an eagle's or Korea Japanese, or Panama United
+States American, and the Khyber jezailchis are paid to help keep it so.
+
+"From the karnal sahib (colonel) at Landi Kotal, whose horse I ride,"
+said the jezailchi slowly, "to the arrficer at Jamrud. To King sahib,
+the arrficer at Ali Masjid I bore a letter also, and left it as I
+passed."
+
+"Had they no spare horse at Ali Masjid? That beast is foundered."
+
+"There are two horses there, and both lame. The man who thou sayest is
+thy brother is heavy on horses."
+
+King nodded. "What is in the letter?" he asked.
+
+"Nay! Have I eyes that can see through paper?"
+
+"Thou hast ears that can listen!" answered King.
+
+"In the letter that I left at Ali Masjid there is news of the lashkar
+that is gathering in the 'Hills,' above Ali Masjid and beyond Khinjan.
+King sahib is ordered to be awake and wary."
+
+"And to lame no more horses jumping them over rocks!"
+
+"Nay, the karnal sahib said he is to ride after no more jackals with a
+spear!"
+
+"Same old game!" said King to himself. "What knowest thou of the lashkar
+that is gathering?"
+
+"I? Oh, a little. An uncle of mine, and three half-brothers, and a
+brother are of its number! One came at night to tempt me to join--but
+I have eaten the salt. It was I who first warned our karnal sahib. Now,
+let me by!"
+
+"Nay, wait!" ordered King. But he lowered his pistol point.
+
+To hold up a despatch rider was about as irregular as any proceeding
+could be; but it was within his province to find out how far the Khyber
+jezailchis could be trusted and within his power more than to make up
+the lost time. So that the irregularity did not trouble him much.
+
+"Does this other letter tell of the lashkar, too?"
+
+"Am I God, that I should know? But of what else should the karnal sahib
+write?"
+
+"What is the object of the rising?" King asked him next; and the man
+threw his head back to laugh like a wolf. Laughter, at night in the
+Khyber, is an insult. Ismail chattered into his beard; but King sat
+still.
+
+"Object? What but to force the Khyber and burst through into India and
+loot? What but to plunder, now that English backs are turned the other
+way?"
+
+"Who said their backs are turned?" demanded King.
+
+"Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ho! Hear him!"
+
+The Khyber echoed the mockery away and away into the distance.
+
+"Their backs are this way and their faces that! The kites know it! The
+vultures know it! The little jackals know it! The little butchas in
+the valley villages all know it! Ask the rocks, and the grass--the very
+water running from the 'Hills'! They all know that the English fight for
+life!"
+
+"And the Khyber jezailchis? What of them?" King asked.
+
+"They know it better than any!"
+
+"And?"
+
+"They make ready, even as I."
+
+"For what?"
+
+"For what Allah shall decide! We ate the salt, we jezailchis. We chose,
+and we ate of our own free will. We have been paid the price we named,
+in silver and rifles and clothing. The arrficers the sirkar sent us are
+men of faith who have made no trouble with our women. What, then, should
+the Khyber jezailchis do? For a little while there will be fighting--or,
+if we be very brave and our arrficers skillful, and Allah would fain see
+sport, then for a longer while. Then we shall be overridden. Then the
+Khyber will be a roaring river of men pouring into India, as my father's
+father told me it has often been! India shall bleed in these days--but
+there will be fighting in the Khyber first!"
+
+"And what of her? Of Yasmini?" King asked.
+
+"Thou wearest that--and askest what of her? Nay--tell!"
+
+"Should she order the jezailchis to be false to the salt--?"
+
+"Such a question!"
+
+The man clucked into his beard and began to fidget in the saddle.
+King gave him another view of the bracelet, and again he found a civil
+answer.
+
+"We of the Rifles have her leave to be loyal to the salt, for, said she,
+otherwise how could we be true men; and she loves no liars. From the
+first, when she first won our hearts in the 'Hills,' she gave us of the
+Rifles leave to be true men first and her servants afterward! We may
+love her--as we do!--and yet fight against her, if so Allah wills--and
+she will yet love us!"
+
+"Where is she?" King asked him suddenly, and the man began to laugh
+again.
+
+"Let me by!" he shouted truculently. "Who am I to sit a horse and gossip
+in the Khyber? Let me by, I say!"
+
+"I will let you by when you have told me where she is!"
+
+"Then I die here, and very likely thou, too!" the man answered, bringing
+his rifle to the port in front of him so quickly that he almost had King
+at a disadvantage. As it was, King was quick enough to balance matters
+by covering him with the pistol again. The horses sensed excitement and
+began to stir. With a laugh the jezailchi let the rifle fall across his
+lap, and at that King put the pistol out of sight.
+
+"Fool!" hissed Ismail in his ear; but King knows the "Hills" better in
+some ways than the savages who live in them; they, for instance, never
+seem able to judge whether there will be a fight presently or not.
+
+"Why won't you tell me where she is?" he asked in his friendliest voice,
+and that would wheedle secrets from the Sphynx.
+
+"Her secrets are her own, and may Allah help her guard them! I will tear
+my tongue out first!"
+
+"Enviable woman!" murmured King. "Pass, friend!" he ordered, reining
+aside. "Take my spare horse and leave me that weary one, so you will
+recover the lost time and more into the bargain."
+
+The man changed horses gladly, saying nothing. When he had shifted the
+saddle and mounted, he began to ride off with a great air, not so much
+as deigning to scowl at Ismail. But he had not ridden a dozen paces when
+he sat round in the saddle and drew rein.
+
+"Sahib!" he called. "Sahib!"
+
+King waited. He had waited for this very thing and could afford to wait
+a minute longer.
+
+"Hast thou--is there--does the sahib--I have not tasted--"
+
+He made a sign with his hand that men recognize in pretty nearly every
+land under the sun.
+
+"So-ho!" laughed King, patting his hip pocket, from which the cap of a
+silver-topped flask had been protruding ever since he put the pistol out
+of sight. "So our copper's hot, eh?"
+
+"May Allah do more to me if my throat is not lined with the fires of
+Eblis!"
+
+"But the Kalamullah!" King objected. "What saith the Prophet?"
+
+"The Prophet forbade the faithful to drink wine," said the jezailchi.
+"He said nothing about whiskey, that I ever heard!"
+
+"Mine is brandy," said King.
+
+"May Allah bless the sahib's sons and grandsons to the seventh
+generation! May Allah--"
+
+"Tell me about Yasmini first! Where is she?"
+
+"Nay!"
+
+King tapped the flask in his pocket.
+
+"Nay! My throat is dry, but it shalt parch! I know not! As to where she
+is, I know not!"
+
+"Remember, and I will give you the whole of it!"
+
+He drew the flask out of his pocket and rode a little way toward the
+man.
+
+"None can overhear. Tell me now."
+
+"Nay, sahib! I am silent!"
+
+"Have you passed her on your way?"
+
+The man shook his head--shook it until the whites of his eyes were a
+streak in the middle of his dark face; and when a Hillman is as vehement
+as that he is surely lying.
+
+King set the flask to his own lips and drank a few drops.
+
+"Salaam, sahib!" said the jezaitchi, wheeling his horse to ride away.
+
+King let him ride twenty paces before calling to him to halt.
+
+"Come back!" he ordered, and rode part of the way to meet him.
+
+"I but tried thee, friend!" he said, holding out the flask.
+
+"Allah then preserve me from a second test!"
+
+The jezailchi seized the flask, clapped it to his lips and drained it to
+the last drop while King sat still in the moonlight and smiled at him.
+
+"God grant the giver peace!" he prayed, handing the flask back. The
+kindly East possesses no word for "Thank you." Then he wheeled the horse
+in a sudden eddy, as polo ponies turn on the Indian plains, and rode
+away down the wind as if the Pass were full of devils in pursuit of him.
+
+King watched him out of sight and then listened until the hoof-beats
+died away and the Pass grew still again.
+
+"The jezailchis'll stand!" he said, lighting a new cheroot. "Good men
+and good luck to 'em!"
+
+Then he rode back to his own men.
+
+"Where starts the trail to Khinjan?" he asked; not that he had forgotten
+it, but to learn who knew.
+
+"This side of Ali Masjid!" they answered all together.
+
+"Two miles this side. More than a mile from here," said Ismail. "What
+next? Shall we camp here? Here is fuel and a little water. Give the
+word--"
+
+"Nay-forward!" ordered King.
+
+"Forward?" growled Ismail. "With this man it is ever 'forward!' Is there
+neither rest nor fear? Has she bewitched him? Hai! Ye lazy ones! Ho!
+Sons of sloth! Urge the mules faster! Beat the led horse!"
+
+So in weird wan moonlight, King led them forward, straight up the
+narrowing gorge, between cliffs that seemed to fray the very bosom of
+the sky. He smoked a cigar and stared at the view, as if he were off
+to the mountains for a month's sport with dependable shikarris whom he
+knew. Nobody could have looked at him and guessed he was not enjoying
+himself.
+
+"That man," mumbled Ismail behind him, "is not as other sahibs I have
+known. He is a man, this one! He will do unexpected things!"
+
+"Forward!" King called to them, thinking they were grumbling. "Forward,
+men of the 'Hills'!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+
+
+
+     The owl he has eyes that are big for his size,
+     And the night like a book he deciphers;
+     "Too-woop!" he asserts, and "Hoo-woo-ip!" he cries,
+     And he means to remark he is awfully wise;
+     But he lags behind us, who are "on" to the lies
+     Of the hairy Himalayan knifers!
+
+     For eyes we be, of Empire, we,
+     Skinned and puckered and quick to see,
+     And nobody guesses how wise we be,
+     Nor hidden in what disguise we be,
+     A-cooking a sudden surprise we be
+     For hairy Himahlyan knifers!
+
+
+After a time King urged his horse to a jog-trot, and the five Hillmen
+pattered in his wake, huddled so close together that the horse could
+easily have kicked more than one of them. The night was cold enough to
+make flesh creep; but it was imagination that herded them until they
+touched the horse's rump and kept the whites of their eyes ever showing
+as they glanced to left and right. The Khyber, fouled by memory, looks
+like the very birthplace of the ghosts when the moon is fitful and a
+mist begins to flow.
+
+"Cheloh!" King called merrily enough; but his horse shied at nothing,
+because horses have an uncanny way of knowing how their riders really
+feel. They led mules and the spare horse, instead of dragging at their
+bridles, pressed forward to have their heads among the men, and every
+once and again there would sound the dull thump of a fist on a beast's
+nose--such being the attitude of men toward the lesser beasts.
+
+They trotted forward until the bed of the Khyber began to grow very
+narrow, and Ali Masjid Fort could not be much more than a mile away, at
+the widest guess. Then King drew rein and dismounted, for he would have
+been challenged had he ridden much farther. A challenge in the Khyber
+after dark consists invariably of a volley at short range, with the mere
+words afterward, and the wise man takes precaution.
+
+"Off with the mules' packs!" he ordered, and the men stood round and
+stared. Darya Khan, leaning on the only rifle in the party, grinned like
+a post-office letter box.
+
+"Truly," growled Ismail, forgetting past expression of a different
+opinion, "this man is as mad as all the other Englishmen."
+
+"Were you ever bitten by one?" wondered King aloud.
+
+"God forbid!"
+
+"Then, off with the packs--and hurry!"
+
+Ismail began to obey.
+
+"Thou! Lord of the Rivers! (For that is what Darya Khan means.) What is
+thy calling?"
+
+"Badragga" (guide), he answered. "Did she not send me back down the Pass
+to be a guide?"
+
+"And before that what wast thou?"
+
+"Is that thy business?" he snarled, shifting his rifle-barrel to the
+other hand. "I am what she says I am! She used to call me 'Chikki'--the
+Lifter!--and I was! There are those who were made to know it! If she
+says now I am badragga, shall any say she lies?"
+
+"I say thou art unpacker of mules' burdens!" answered King. "Begin!"
+
+For answer the fellow grinned from ear to ear and thrust the
+rifle-barrel forward insolently. King, with the movement of
+determination that a man makes when about to force conclusions, drew up
+his sleeves above the wrist. At that instant the moon shone through the
+mist and the gold bracelet glittered in the moonlight.
+
+"May God be with thee!" said "Lord of the Rivers" at once. And without
+another word he laid down his rifle and went to help off-load the mules.
+
+King stepped aside and cursed softly. To a man who knows how to enforce
+his own authority, it is worse than galling to be obeyed because he
+wears a woman's favor. But for a vein of wisdom that underlay his pride
+he would have pocketed the bracelet there and then and have refused to
+wear it again. But as he sweated his pride he overheard Ismail growl:
+
+"Good for thee! He had taught thee obedience in another bat of the eye!"
+
+"I obey her!" muttered Darya Khan.
+
+"I, too," said Ishmail. "So shall he before the week dies! But now it is
+good to obey him. He is an ugly man to disobey!"
+
+"I obey him until she sets me free, then," grumbled Darya Khan.
+
+"Better for thee!" said Ismail.
+
+The packs were laid on the ground, and the mules shook themselves, while
+the jackals that haunt the Khyber came closer, to sit in a ring and
+watch. King dug a flashlight out of one of the packs, gave it to Ismail
+to hold, sat on the other pack and began to write on a memorandum pad.
+It was a minute before he could persuade Ismail that the flashlight was
+harmless, and another minute before he could get him to hold it still.
+Then, however, he wrote swiftly.
+
+        "In the Khyber, a mile below you.
+
+        "Dear Old Man--I would like to run in and see you, but
+        circumstances don't permit.  Several people sent you
+        their regards by me.  Herewith go two mules and their
+        packs.  Make any use of the mules you like, but store
+        the loads where I can draw on them in case of need.
+        I would like to have a talk with you before taking the
+        rather desperate step I intend, but I don't want to be
+        seen entering or leaving Ali Masjid.  Can you come
+        down the Pass without making your intention known?
+        It is growing misty now.  It ought to be easy.  My men
+        will tell you where I am and show you the way.  Why
+        not destroy this letter?
+
+        "Athelstan."
+
+He folded the note and stuck a postage stamp on it in lieu of seal. Then
+he examined the packs with the aid of the flashlight, sorted them and
+ordered two of the mules reloaded.
+
+"You three!" he ordered then. "Take the loaded mules into Ali Masjid
+Fort. Take this chit, you. Give it to the sahib in command there."
+
+They stood and gaped at him, wide-eyed--then I came closer to see his
+eyes and to catch any whisper that Ismail might have for them. But
+Ismail and Darya Khan seemed full of having been chosen to stay behind;
+they offered no suggestions--certainly no encouragement to mutiny.
+
+"To hear is to obey!" said the nearest man, seizing the note, for at all
+events that was the easiest task. His action decided the other two. They
+took the mules' leading-reins and followed him. Before they had gone
+ten paces they were all swallowed in the mist that had begun to flow
+southeastward; it closed on them like a blanket, and in a minute more
+the clink of shod hooves had ceased. The night grew still, except for
+the whimpering of jackals. Ismail came nearer and squatted at King's
+feet.
+
+"Why, sahib?" he asked: and Darya Khan came closer, too. King had tied
+the reins of the two horses and the one remaining mule together in a
+knot and was sitting on the pack.
+
+"Why not?" he countered.
+
+Solemn, almost motionless, squatted on their hunkers, they looked like
+two great vultures watching an animal die.
+
+"What have they done that they should be sent away?" asked Ismail. "What
+have they done that they should be sent to the fort, where the arrficer
+will put them in irons?"
+
+"Why should he put them in irons?" asked King.
+
+"Why not? Here in the Khyber there is often a price on men's heads!"
+
+"And not in Delhi?"
+
+"In Delhi these were not known. There were no witnesses in Delhi. In the
+fort at Ali Masjid there will be a dozen ready to swear to them!"
+
+"Then, why did they obey?" asked King.
+
+"What is that on the sahib's wrist?"
+
+"You mean--?"
+
+"Sahib--if she said, 'Walk into the fire or over that Cliff!' there be
+many in these 'Hills' who would obey without murmuring!"
+
+"I have nothing against them," said King. "As long as they are my men I
+will not send them into a trap."
+
+"Good!" nodded Ismail and Darya Khan together, but they did not seem
+really satisfied.
+
+"It is good," said Ismail, "that she should have nothing against thee,
+sahib! Those three men are in thy keeping!"
+
+"And I in thine?" King asked, but neither man answered him.
+
+They sat in silence for five minutes. Then suddenly the two Hillmen
+shuddered, although King did not bat an eyelid. Din burst into being. A
+volley ripped out of the night and thundered down the Pass.
+
+"How-utt! Hukkums dar?" came the insolent challenge half a minute after
+it--the proof positive that Ali Masjid's guards neither slept nor were
+afraid.
+
+A weird wail answered the challenge, and there began a tossing to and
+fro of words, that was prelude to a shouted invitation:
+
+"Ud-vance-frrrennen-orsss-werrul!"
+
+English can be as weirdly distorted as wire, or any other supple medium,
+and native levies advance distortion to the point of art; but the
+language sounds no less good in the chilly gloom of a Khyber night.
+
+Followed another wait, this time of half an hour. Then a man's
+footsteps--a booted, leather-heeled man, striding carelessly. Not far
+behind him was the softer noise of sandals. The man began to whistle
+Annie Laurie.
+
+"Charles? That you?" called King.
+
+"That you, old man?"
+
+A man in khaki stepped into the moonlight. He was so nearly the image of
+Athelstan King that Ismail and Darya Khan stood up and stared. Athelstan
+strode to meet him. Their walk was the same. Angle for angle, line
+for line, they might have been one man and his shadow, except for
+three-quarters of an inch of stature.
+
+"Glad to see you, old man," said Athelstan.
+
+"Sure, old chap!" said Charles; and they shook hands.
+
+"What's the desperate proposal?" asked the younger.
+
+"I'll tell you when we are alone."
+
+His brother nodded and stood a step aside. The three who had taken the
+note to the fort came closer--partly to call attention to themselves,
+partly to claim credit, partly because the outer silence frightened
+them. They elbowed Ismail and Darya Khan, and one of them received a
+savage blow in the stomach by way of retort from Ismail. Before that
+spark could start an explosion Athelstan interfered.
+
+"Ismail! Take two men. Go down the Pass out of car-shot, and keep watch!
+Come back when I whistle thus--but no sooner!"
+
+He put fingers between his teeth and blew until the night shrilled back
+at him. Ismail seized the leather bag and started to obey.
+
+"Leave that bag. Leave it, I say!"
+
+"But some man may steal it, sahib. How shall a thief know there is no
+money in it?"
+
+"Leave it and go!"
+
+Ismail departed, grumbling, and King turned on Darya Khan.
+
+"Take the remaining man, and go up the Pass!" he ordered. "Stand out of
+ear-shot and keep watch. Come when I whistle!"
+
+"But this one has a belly ache where Ismail smote him! Can a man with
+a belly ache stand guard? His moaning will betray both him and me!"
+objected "Lord of the Rivers."
+
+"Take him and go!" commanded King.
+
+"But--"
+
+King was careful now not to show his bracelet.
+
+But there was something in his eye and in his attitude--a subtle
+suggestive something-or-other about him--that was rather more convincing
+than a pistol or a stick. Darya Khan thrust his rifle-end into the hurt
+man's stomach for encouragement and started off into the mist.
+
+"Come and ache out of the sahibs' sight!" he snarled.
+
+In a minute King and his brother stood unseen, unheard in the shadow by
+a patch of silver moonlight. Athelstan sat down on the mule's pack.
+
+"Well?" said the younger. "Tell me. I shall have to hurry. You see I'm
+in charge back there. They saw me come out, but I hope to teach 'em a
+lesson going back."
+
+Athelstan nodded. "Good!" he said. "I've a roving commission. I'm
+ordered to enter Khinjan Caves."
+
+His brother whistled. "Tall order! What's your plan?"
+
+"Haven't one--yet. Know more when I'm nearer Khinjan. You can help no
+end."
+
+"How? Name it!"
+
+"I shall go up in disguise. Nobody can put the stain on as well as you.
+But tell me something first. Any news of a holy war yet?"
+
+His brother nodded. "Plenty of talk about one to come," he said. "We
+keep hearing of that lashkar that we can't locate, under a mullah whose
+name seems to change with the day of the week. And there are everlasting
+tales about the 'Heart of the Hills."'
+
+"No explanation of 'em?" Athelstan asked him.
+
+"None! Not a thing!"
+
+"D'you know of Yasmini?"
+
+"Heard of her of course," said his brother.
+
+"Has she come up the Pass?"
+
+His brother laughed. "No, neither she nor a coach and four."
+
+"I have heard the contrary," said Athelstan.
+
+"Heard what, exactly?"
+
+"She's up the Pass ahead of me."
+
+"She hasn't passed Ali Masjid!" said his brother, and Athelstan nodded.
+
+"Are the Turks in the show yet?" asked Charles.
+
+"Not yet. But I know they're expected in."
+
+"You bet they're expected in!" The younger man grinned from ear to ear.
+"They're working both tides under to prepare the tribes for it. They
+flatter themselves they can set alight a holy war that will put Timour
+Ilang to shame. You should hear my jezailchies talk at night when they
+think I'm not listening!"
+
+"The jezailchies'll stand though," said Athelstan.
+
+"Stake my life on it!" said his brother. "They'll stick to the last
+man!"
+
+"I can't tell you," said Athelstan, "why we're not attacking brother
+Turk before he's ready. I imagine Whitehall has its hands full. But it's
+likely enough that the Turk will throw in his lot with the Prussians the
+minute he's ready to begin. Meanwhile my job is to help make the holy
+war seem unprofitable to the tribes, so that they'll let the Turk down
+hard when he calls on 'em. Every day that I can point to forts held
+strongly in the Khyber is a day in my favor. There are sure to be raids.
+In fact, the more the merrier, provided they're spasmodic. We must keep
+'em separated--keep 'em from swarming too fast--while I sow other seeds
+among 'em."
+
+His brother nodded. Sowing seeds was almost that family's hereditary
+job. Athelstan continued:
+
+"Hang on to Ali Masjid like a leech, old man! The day one raiding
+lashkar gets command of the Khyber's throat, the others'll all believe
+they've won the game. Nothing'll stop 'em then! Look out for traps.
+Smash 'em on sight. But don't follow up too far!"
+
+"Sure," said Charles.
+
+"Help me with the stain now, will you?"
+
+With his flash-light burning as if its battery provided current by the
+week instead of by the minute, Athelstan dragged open the mule's pack
+and produced a host of things. He propped a mirror against the pack and
+squatted in front of it. Then he passed a little bottle to his brother,
+and Charles attended to the chin-strap mark that would have betrayed him
+a British officer in any light brighter than dusk. In a few minutes his
+whole face was darkened to one hue, and Charles stepped back to look at
+it.
+
+"Won't need to wash yourself for a month!" he said. "The dirt won't
+show!" He sniffed at the bottle. "But that stain won't come off if you
+do wash--never worry! You'll do finely."
+
+"Not yet, I won't!" said Athelstan, picking up a little safety razor and
+beginning on his mustache. In a minute he had his upper lip bare. Then
+his brother bent over him and rubbed in stain where the scrubby mustache
+had been.
+
+After that Athelstan unlocked the leather bag that had caused Ismail so
+much concern and shook out from it a pile of odds and ends at which
+his brother nodded with perfect understanding. The principal item was
+a piece of silk--forty or fifty yards of it--that he proceeded to
+bind into a turban on his head, his brother lending him a guiding,
+understanding finger at every other turn. When that was done, the man
+who had said he looked in the least like a British officer would have
+lied.
+
+One after another he drew on native garments, picking them from the pile
+beside him. So, by rapid stages he developed into a native hakim--by
+creed a converted Hindu, like Rewa Gunga,--one of the men who practise
+yunani, or modern medicine, without a license and with a very great deal
+of added superstition, trickery and guesswork.
+
+"I wouldn't trust you with a ha'penny!" announced his brother when he
+had done.
+
+"Really? As good as all that?"
+
+"The part to a T."
+
+"Well--take these into the fort for me, will you?" His brother caught
+the bundle of discarded European clothes and tucked them under his arm.
+"Now, re-member, old man! This is the biggest show there has ever been!
+We've got to hold the Khyber, and we can't do it by riding pell-mell
+into the first trap set for us! We must smash when the fighting
+starts--but we mayn't miss! We mayn't run past the mark! Be a coward,
+if that's the name you care to give it. You needn't tell me you've got
+orders to hunt skirmishers to a standstill, because I know better. I
+know you've just had your wig pulled for laming two horses!"
+
+"How d'you know that?"
+
+"Never mind! I've been seconded to your crowd. I'm your senior, and I'm
+giving you orders. This show isn't sport, but the real red thing, and
+I want to count on you to fight like a trained man, not like a
+natural-born fool. I want to know you're holding Ali Masjid like Fabius
+held Rome, by being slow and wily, just for the sake of the comfortable
+feeling it will give me when I'm alone among the 'Hills.' Hit hard when
+you have to, but for God's sake, old man, ware traps!"
+
+"All right," said his brother.
+
+"Then good-by, old man!"
+
+"Good-by, Athelstan!"
+
+They stood facing and shook hands. Where had been a man and his
+reflection in the mist, there now seemed to be the same man and a
+native. Athelstan King had changed his very nature with his clothes.
+He stood like a native--moved like one; even his voice was changed, as
+if--like the actor who dyed himself all over to act Othello--he could do
+nothing by halves.
+
+"I'm going to try to get in without my men seeing me!" said the younger.
+
+"If they do see you, they'll shoot!"
+
+"Yes, and miss! Trust a Khyber jezailchi not to hit much in the dark!
+It'll do 'em good either way. I'll have time to give 'em the password
+before they fire a second volley. They're not really dangerous till the
+third one. Good-by!"
+
+"By, Charles!"
+
+Officers in that force are not chosen for their clumsiness, or inability
+to move silently by night. His foot-steps died in the mist almost as
+quickly as his shadow. Before he had been gone a minute the Pass was
+silent as death again, and though Athelstan listened with trained ears,
+the only sound he could detect was of a jackal cracking a bone fifty or
+sixty yards away.
+
+He repacked the loads, putting everything back carefully into the big
+leather envelopes and locking the empty hand-bag, after throwing in a
+few stones for Ismail's benefit. Then he went to sit in the moonlight,
+with his back to a great rock and waited there cross-legged to give his
+brother time to make good a retreat through the mist. When there was
+no more doubt that his own men, at all events, had failed to detect the
+lieutenant, he put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.
+
+Almost at once he heard sandals come pattering from both directions. As
+they emerged out of the mist he sat silent and still. It was Darya Khan
+who came first and stood gaping at him, but Ismail was a very close
+second, and the other three were only a little behind. For full two
+minutes after the man with the sore stomach had come they all stood
+holding one another's arms, astonished. Then--
+
+"Where is he?" asked Ismail.
+
+"Who?" said King, the hakim.
+
+"Our sahib--King sahib--where is he?"
+
+"Gone!"
+
+Even his voice was so completely changed that men who had been reared
+amid mutual suspicion could not recognize it.
+
+"But there are his loads! There is his mule!"
+
+"Here is his bag!" said Ismail, pouncing on it, picking it up and
+shaking it. "It rattles not as formerly! There is more in it than there
+was!"
+
+"His two horses and the mule are here," said Darya Khan.
+
+"Did I say he took them with him?" asked the hakim, who sat still with
+his back to a rock. "He went because I came! He left me here in charge!
+Should he not leave the wherewithal to make me comfortable, since I must
+do his work? Hah! What do I see? A man bent nearly double? That means a
+belly ache! Who should have a belly ache when I have potions, lotions,
+balms to heal all ills, magic charms and talismans, big and little
+pills--and at such a little price! So small a price! Show me the belly
+and pay your money! Forget not the money, for nothing is free except
+air, water and the Word of God! I have paid money for water before now,
+and where is the mullah who will not take a fee? Nay, only air costs
+nothing! For a rupee, then--for one rupee I will heal the sore belly and
+forget to be ashamed for taking such a little fee!"
+
+"Whither went the sahib? Nay--show us proof!" objected Darya Khan; and
+Ismail stood back a pace to scratch his flowing beard and think.
+
+"The sahib left this with me!" said King, and held up his wrist. The
+gold bracelet Rewa Gunga had given him gleamed in the pale moonlight.
+
+"May God be with thee!" boomed all five men together.
+
+King jumped to his feet so suddenly that all five gave way in front of
+him, and Darya Khan brought his rifle to the port.
+
+"Hast thou never seen me before?" he demanded, seizing Ismail by the
+shoulders and staring straight into his eyes.
+
+"Nay, I never saw thee!"
+
+"Look again!"
+
+He turned his head, to show his face in profile.
+
+"Nay, I never saw thee!"
+
+"Thou, then! Thou with the belly! Thou! Thou!"
+
+They all denied ever having seen him.
+
+So he stepped back until the moon shone full in his face and pulled off
+his turban, changing his expression at the same time.
+
+"Now look!"
+
+"Ma'uzbillah! (May God protect us!)"
+
+"Now ye know me?"
+
+"Hee-yee-yee!" yelled Ismail, hugging himself by the elbows and
+beginning to dance from side to side. "Hee-yee-yee! What said I? Said
+I not so? Said I not this is a different man? Said I not this is a
+good one--a man of unexpected things? Said I not there was magic in the
+leather bag? I shook it often, and the magic grew! Hee-yee-yee! Look at
+him! See such cunning! Feel him! Smell of him! He is a good one--good!"
+
+Three of the others stood and grinned, now that their first shock of
+surprise had died away. The fourth man poked among the packs. There was
+little to see except gleaming teeth and the whites of eyes, set in hairy
+faces in the mist. But Ismail danced all by himself among the stones of
+Khyber road and he looked like a bearded ghoul out for an airing.
+
+"Hee-yee-yee! She smelt out a good one! Hee-yee-yee! This is a man after
+my heart! Hee-yee-yee! God preserve me! God preserve me to see the end
+of this! This one will show sport! Oh-yee-yee-yee!"
+
+Suddenly be closed with King and hugged him until the stout ribs cracked
+and bent inward and King sobbed for breath among the strands of the
+Afridi's beard. He had to use knuckles and knees and feet to win
+freedom, and though he used them with all his might and hurt the old
+savage fiercely, he made no impression on his good will.
+
+"After my own heart, thou art! Spirit of a cunning one! Worker of
+spells! Allah! That was a good day when she bade me wait for thee!"
+
+King sat down again, panting. He wanted time to get his breath back and
+a little of the ache out of his ribs, but he did not care to waste any
+more minutes, and his eyes watched the faces of the other four men. He
+saw them slowly waken to understanding of what Ismail meant by "worker
+of spells" and "magic in the bag" and knew that he had even greater hold
+on them now than Yasmini's bracelet gave him.
+
+"Ma'uzbillah!" they murmured as Ismail's meaning dawned and they
+recognized a magician in their midst. "May God protect us!"
+
+"May God protect me! I have need of it!" said King. "What shall my new
+name be? Give ye me a name!"
+
+"Nay, choose thou!" urged Ismail, drawing nearer. "We have seen one
+miracle; now let us hear another!"
+
+"Very well. Khan is a title of respect. Since I wish for respect, I
+will call myself Khan. Name me a village the first name you can think
+of--quick!"
+
+"Kurram," said Ismail, at a hazard.
+
+"Kurram is good. Kurram I am! Kurram Khan is my name henceforward!
+Kurram Khan the dakitar!"
+
+"But where is the sahib who came from the fort to talk?" asked the man
+whose stomach ached yet from Ismail and Darya Khan's attentions to it.
+
+"Gone!" announced King. "He went with the other one!"
+
+"Went whither? Did any see him go?"
+
+"Is that thy affair?" asked King, and the man collapsed. It is not
+considered wise to the north of Jamrud to argue with a wizard, or even
+with a man who only claims to be one. This was a man who had changed his
+very nature almost under their eyes.
+
+"Even his other clothes have gone!" murmured one man, he who had poked
+about among the packs.
+
+"And now, Ismail, Darya Khan, ye two dunder-heads!--ye bellies without
+brains!--when was there ever a dakitar--a hakim, who had not two
+assistants at the least? Have ye never seen, ye blinder-than-bats--how
+one man holds a patient while his boils are lanced, and yet another
+makes the hot iron ready?"
+
+"Aye! Aye!"
+
+They had both seen that often.
+
+"Then, what are ye?"
+
+They gaped at him. Were they to work wonders too? Were they to be part
+and parcel of the miracle? Watching them, King saw understanding dawn
+behind Ismail's eyes and knew he was winning more than a mere admirer.
+He knew it might be days yet, might be weeks before the truth was out,
+but it seemed to him that Ismail was at heart his friend. And there are
+no friendships stronger than those formed in the Khyber and beyond--no
+more loyal partnerships. The "Hills" are the home of contrasts,
+of blood-feuds that last until the last-but-one man dies, and of
+friendships that no crime or need or slander can efface. If the feuds
+are to be avoided like the devil, the friendships are worth having.
+
+"There is another thing ye might do," he suggested, "if ye two grown men
+are afraid to see a boil slit open. Always there are timid patients who
+hang back and refuse to drink the medicines. There should be one or two
+among the crowd who will come forward and swallow the draughts eagerly,
+in proof that no harm results. Be ye two they!"
+
+Ismail spat savagely.
+
+"Nay! Bismillah! Nay, nay! I will hold them who have boils, sitting
+firmly on their bellies--so--or between their shoulders--thus--when
+the boils are behind! Nay, I will drink no draughts! I am a man, not a
+cess-pool!"
+
+"And I will study how to heat hot irons!" said Darya Khan, with grim
+conviction. "It is likely that, having worked for a blacksmith once, I
+may learn quickly! Phaughghgh! I have tasted physic! I have drunk Apsin
+Saats! (Epsom Salts.)"
+
+He spat, too, in a very fury of reminiscence.
+
+"Good!" said King. "Henceforward, then, I am Kurram Khan, the dakitar,
+and ye two are my assistants, Ismail to hold the men with boils, and
+Darya Khan to heat the irons--both of ye to be my men and support me
+with words when need be!"
+
+"Aye!" said Ismail, quick to think of details, "and these others shall
+be the tasters! They have big bellies, that will hold many potions
+without crowding. Let them swallow a little of each medicine in the
+chest now, for the sake of practise! Let them learn not to make a wry
+face when the taste of cess-pools rests on the tongue--"
+
+"Aye, and the breath comes sobbing through the nose!" said Darya Khan,
+remembering fragments of an adventurous career. "Let them learn to drink
+Apsin Saats without coughing!"
+
+"We will not drink the medicines!" announced the man who had a stomach
+ache. "Nay, nay!"
+
+But Ismail hit him with the back of his hand in the stomach again and
+danced away, hugging himself and shouting "Hee-yee-yee!" until the
+jackals joined him in discontented chorus and the Khyber Pass became
+full of weird howling. Then suddenly the old Afridi thought of something
+else and came back to thrust his face close to King's.
+
+"Why be a Rangar? Why be a Rajput, sahib? She loves us Hillmen better!"
+
+"Do I look like a Hillman of the 'Hills'?" asked King.
+
+"Nay, not now. But he who can work one miracle can work another. Change
+thy skin once more and be a true Hillman!"
+
+"Aye!" King laughed. "And fall heir to a blood-feud with every second
+man I chance upon! A Hill-man is cousin to a hundred others, and what
+say they in the 'Hills'?--'to hate like cousins,' eh? All cousins are
+at war. As a Rangar I have left my cousins down in India. Better be
+a converted Hindu and be despised by some than have cousins in the
+'Hills'! Besides--do I speak like a Hillman?"
+
+"Aye! Never an Afridi spake his own tongue better!"
+
+"Yet--does a Hillman slip? Would a Hillman use Punjabi words in a
+careless moment?"'
+
+"God forbid!"
+
+"Therefore, thou dunderhead, I will be a Rangar Rajput,--a stranger in
+a strange land, traveling by her favor to visit her in Khinjan!
+Thus, should I happen to make mistakes in speech or action, it may be
+overlooked, and each man will unwittingly be my advocate, explaining
+away my errors to himself and others instead of my enemy denouncing me
+to all and sundry! Is that clear, thou oaf?"
+
+"Aye! Thou art more cunning than any man I ever met!"
+
+The great Afridi began to rub the tips of his fingers through his
+straggly beard in a way that might mean anything, and King seemed to
+draw considerable satisfaction from it, as if it were a sign language
+that he understood. More than any one thing in the world just then
+he needed a friend, and he certainly did not propose to refuse such a
+useful one.
+
+"And," he added, as if it were an afterthought, instead of his chief
+reason, "if her special man Rewa Gunga is a Rangar, and is known as a
+Rangar through out the 'Hills,' shall I not the more likely win favor
+by being a Rangar too? If I wear her bracelet and at the same time am a
+Rangar, who will not trust me?"
+
+"True! Thou art a magician!"
+
+"True!" agreed Ismail.
+
+But the moon was getting low and Khyber would be dark again in half an
+hour, for the great crags in the distance to either hand shut off more
+light than do the Khyber walls. The mist, too, was growing thicker. It
+was time to make a move.
+
+King rose. "Pack the mule and bring my horse!" he ordered and they
+hurried to obey with alacrity born of new respect, Darya Khan attending
+to the trimming of the mule's load in person instead of snarling at
+another man. It was a very different little escort from the one that
+had come thus far. Like King himself, it had changed its very nature in
+fifteen minutes!
+
+They brought the horse, and King laughed at them, calling the
+idiots--men without eyes.
+
+"The saddle?" Ismail suggested. "It is a government arrficer's saddle."
+
+"Stolen!" said King, and they nodded. "Stolen along with the horse!"
+
+"Then the bridle?"
+
+"Stolen too, ye men without eyes! Ye insects! A Stolen horse and saddle
+and bridle, are they not a passport of gentility this side of the
+border?"
+
+"Aye!"
+
+"I am Kurram Khan, the dakitar, but who in the 'Hills' would believe it?
+Look now--look ye and tell me what is wrong?"
+
+He pointed to the horse, and they stood in a row and stared.
+
+"Shorten those stirrups, then, six holes at the least! Men will laugh at
+me if I ride like a British arrficer!"
+
+"Aye!" said Ismail, hurrying to obey.
+
+"Aye! Aye! Aye!" agreed the others.
+
+"Now," he said, gathering the reins and swinging into the saddle, "who
+knows the way to Khinjan?"
+
+"Which of us does not!"
+
+"Ye all know it? Then ye all are border thieves and worse! No honest man
+knows that road! Lead on, Darya Khan, thou Lord of Rivers! Do thy duty
+as badragga and beware lest we get our knees wet at the fords! Ismail,
+you march next. Now I. You other two and the mule follow me. Let the man
+with the belly ache ride last on the other horse. So! Forward march!"
+
+So Darya Khan led the way with his rifle, and King's face glowed in
+cigarette light not very far behind him as he legged his horse up the
+narrow track that led northward out of the Khyber bed.
+
+It would be a long time before he would dare smoke a cigar again, and
+his supply of cigarettes was destined to dwindle down to nothing before
+that day. But he did not seem to mind.
+
+"Cheloh!" he called. "Forward, men of the mountains! Kuch dar nahin
+hai!"
+
+"Thy mother and the spirit of a fight were one!" swore Ismail just in
+front of him, stepping out like a boy going to a picnic. "She will love
+thee! Allah! She will love thee! Allah! Allah!"
+
+The thought seemed to appal him. For hours after that he climbed ahead
+in silence.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+
+
+     Dear is the swagger that takes a man in
+             Helmeted, clattering, proud.
+     Sweet are the honors the arrogant win,
+             Hot from the breath of a crowd.
+     Precious the spirit that never will bend--
+             Hot challenge for insolent stare!
+     But--talk when you've tried it!--to win in the end,
+     Go ahsti!*  Be meek!  And beware!
+
+     [* Slowly.]
+
+
+Even with the man with the stomach Ache mounted on the spare horse for
+the sake of extra speed (and he was not suffering one-fifth so much as
+he pretended); with Ismail to urge, and King to coax, and the fear of
+mountain death on every side of them, they were the part of a night and
+a day and a night and a part of another day in reaching Khinjan.
+
+Darya Khan, with the rifle held in both hands, led the way swiftly,
+but warily; and the last man's eyes looked ever backward, for many a
+sneaking enemy might have seen them and have judged a stern chase worth
+while.
+
+In the "Hills" the hunter has all the best of it, and the hunted needs
+must run. The accepted rule is to stalk one's enemy relentlessly and get
+him first. King happened to be bunting, although not for human life, and
+he felt bold, but the men with him dreaded each upstanding crag, that
+might conceal a rifleman. Armed men behind corners mean only one thing
+in the "Hills."
+
+The animals grew weary to the verge of dropping, for the "road" had been
+made for the most part by mountain freshets, and where that was not the
+case it was imaginary altogether. They traveled upward, along ledges
+that were age-worn in the limestone--downward where the "hell-stones"
+slid from under them to almost bottomless ravines, and a false step
+would have been instant death--up again between big edged boulders, that
+nipped the mule's pack and let the mule between--past many and many a
+lonely cairn that hid the bones of a murdered man (buried to keep his
+ghost from making trouble)--ever with a tortured ridge of rock for
+sky-line and generally leaning against a wind, that chilled them to the
+bone, while the fierce sun burned them.
+
+At night and at noon they slept fitfully at the chance-met shrine of
+some holy man. The "Hills" are full of them, marked by fluttering rags
+that can be seen for miles away; and though the Quran's meaning must be
+stretched to find excuse, the Hillmen are adept at stretching things and
+hold those shrines as sacred as the Book itself. Men who would almost
+rather cut throats than gamble regard them as sanctuaries.
+
+When a man says he is holy he can find few in the "Hills" to believe
+him; but when he dies or is tortured to death or shot, even the men who
+murdered him will come and revere his grave.
+
+Whole villages leave their preciousest possessions at a shrine before
+wandering in search of summer pasture. They find them safe on their
+return, although the "Hills" are the home of the lightest-fingered
+thieves on earth, who are prouder of villainy than of virtue. A man
+with a blood-feud, and his foe hard after him, may sleep in safety at
+a faquir's grave. His foe will wait within range, but he will not draw
+trigger until the grave is left behind.
+
+So a man may rest in temporary peace even on the road to Khinjan,
+although Khinjan and peace have nothing whatever in common.
+
+It was at such a shrine, surrounded by tattered rags tied to sticks,
+that fluttered in the wind three or four thousand feet above Khyber
+level, that King drew Ismail into conversation, and deftly forced on him
+the role of questioner.
+
+"How can'st thou see the Caves!" he asked, for King had hinted at his
+intention; and for answer King gave him a glimpse of the gold bracelet.
+
+"Aye! Well and good! But even she dare not disobey the rule. Khinjan was
+there before she came, and the rule was there from the beginning, when
+the first men found the Caves! Some--hundreds--have gained admission,
+lacking the right. But who ever saw them again? Allah! I, for one, would
+not chance it!"
+
+"Thou and I are two men!" answered King. "Allah gave thee qualities I
+lack. He gave thee the strength of a bull and a mountain goat in one,
+and her for a mistress. To me he gave other qualities. I shall see the
+Caves. I am not afraid."
+
+"Aye! He gave thee other gifts indeed! But listen! How many Indian
+servants of the British Raj have set out to see the Caves? Many,
+many--aye, very many! Again and again the sirkar sent its loyal ones.
+Did any return? Not one! Some were crucified before they reached the
+place. One died slowly on the very rock whereon we sit, with his eyelids
+missing and his eyes turned to the sun! Some entered Khinjan, and the
+women of the place made sport with them. Those would rather have been
+crucified outside had they but known. Some, having got by Khinjan,
+entered the Caves. None ever came out again!"
+
+"Then, what is my case to thee?" King asked him "If I can not come out
+again and there is a secret then the secret will be kept, and what is
+the trouble?"
+
+"I love thee," the Afridi answered simply. "Thou art a man after mine
+own heart. Turn! Go back before it is too late!"
+
+King shook his head.
+
+"Be warned!"
+
+Ismail reached out a hairy-backed hand that shook with half-suppressed
+emotion.
+
+"When we reach Khinjan, and I come within reach of her orders again,
+then I am her man, not thine!"
+
+King smiled, glancing again at the gold bracelet on his arm.
+
+"I look like her man, too!"
+
+"Thou!" Ismail's scorn was well feigned if it was not real. "Thou
+chicken running to the hand that will pluck thy breast-feathers!
+Listen! Abdurrahman--he of Khabul--and may Allah give his ugly bones no
+peace!--Abdurrahman of Khabul sought the secret of the Caves. He sent
+his men to set an ambush. They caught twenty coming out of Khinjan on
+a raid. The twenty were carried to Khabul and put to torture there.
+How many, think you, told the secret under torture? They died cursing
+Abdurrahman to his face and he died without the secret! May God
+recompense him with the fire that burns forever and scalding water and
+ashes to eat! May rats eat his bones!"
+
+"Had Abdurrahman this?" asked King, touching the bracelet.
+
+"Nay! He would have given one eye for it, but none would trade with him!
+He knew of it, but never saw it."
+
+"I am more favored. I have it. It is hers, is it not?"
+
+"Does not she know the secret?"
+
+"She knows all that any man knows and more!"
+
+"Was she seen to slay a man in the teeth of written law?" asked King,
+and Ismail stared so hard at him that he laughed.
+
+"I was in Khinjan once before, my friend! I know the rule! I failed to
+reach the Caves that other time because I had no witnesses to swear they
+had seen me slay a man in the teeth of written law. I know!"
+
+"Who saw thee this time?" Ismail asked, and began to cackle with the
+cruel humor of the "Hills," that sees amusement in a man's undoing, or
+in the destruction of his plans. His humor forced him to explain.
+
+"The price of an entrance has come of late to be the life of an English
+arrficer! Many an one the English have dubbed Ghazi, because he crossed
+the border and buried his knife in a man on church parade! They hang
+and burn them, knowing our Muslim law, that denies Heaven to him who is
+hanged and burned. Yet the man they miscall ghazi sought but the key to
+Khinjan Caves, with no thought at all about Heaven! Thou art a British
+arrficer. It may be they will let thee enter the Caves at her bidding.
+It may be, too, that they will keep thee in a cage there for some
+chief's son to try his knife on when the time comes to win admission!
+Listen--man o' my heart!--so strict is the rule that boys born in the
+Caves, when they come to manhood, must go and slay an Englishman and
+earn outlawry before they may come back; and lest they prove fearful and
+betray the secret, ten men follow each. They die by the hand of one or
+other of the ten unless they have slain their man within two weeks. So
+the secret has been kept more years than ten men can remember!" (That
+estimate was doubtless due to a respect for figures and bore no relation
+to the length of a human generation.)
+
+"Whom did she kill to gain admission?" King asked him unexpectedly.
+
+"Ask her!" said Ismail. "It is her business."
+
+"And thou? Was the life of a British officer the price paid?"
+
+"Nay. I slew a mullah."
+
+The calmness of the admission, and the satisfaction that its memory
+seemed to bring the owner made King laugh. He found lawless satisfaction
+for himself in that Ismail's blood-price should have been a priest, not
+one of his brother officers. A man does not follow King's profession for
+health, profit or sentiment's sake, but healthy sentiment remains. The
+loyalty that drives him, and is its own most great reward, makes him a
+man to the middle. He liked Ismail. He could not have liked him in the
+same way if he had known him guilty of English blood, which is only
+proof, of course, that sentiment and common justice are not one. But
+sentiment remains. Justice is an ideal.
+
+"Be warned and go back!" urged Ismail.
+
+"Come with me, then."
+
+"Nay, I am her man. She waits for me!"
+
+"I imagine she waits for me!" laughed King. "Forward! We have rested in
+this place long enough!"
+
+So on they went, climbing and descending the naked ramparts that lead
+eastward and upward and northward to the Roof of Mother Earth--Ismail
+ever grumbling into his long beard, and King consumed by a fiercer
+enthusiasm than ever had yet burned in him,
+
+"Forward! Forward! Cast hounds forward! Forward in any event!" says
+Cocker. It is only regular generals in command of troops in the field
+who must keep their rear open for retreat. The Secret Service thinks
+only of the goal ahead.
+
+It was ten of a blazing forenoon, and the sun had heated up the rocks
+until it was pain to walk on them and agony to sit, when they topped the
+last escarpment and came in sight of Khinjan's walls, across a
+mile-wide rock ravine--Khinjan the unregenerate, that has no other human
+habitation within a march because none dare build.
+
+They stood on a ridge and leaned against the wind. Beneath them a path
+like a rope ladder descended in zigzags to the valley that is Khinjan's
+dry moat; it needed courage as well as imagination to believe that the
+animals could be guided down it.
+
+"Is there no other way?" asked King. He knew well of one other, but one
+does not tell all one knows in the "Hills," and there might have been a
+third way.
+
+"None from this side," said Ismail.
+
+"And on the other side?"
+
+"There is a rather better path--that by which the sirkar's troops once
+came--although it has been greatly obstructed since. It is two days'
+march from here to reach it. Be warned a last time, sahib--little
+hakim--be warned and go back!"
+
+"Thou bird of ill omen!" laughed King. "Must thou croak from every rock
+we rest on?"
+
+"If I were a bird I would fly away back with thee!" said Ismail.
+
+"Forward, since we can not fly--forward and downward!" King answered.
+"She must have crossed this valley. Therefore there are things worth
+while beyond! Forward!"
+
+The animals, weary to death anyhow, fell rather that walked down the
+track. The men sat and scrambled. And the heat rose up to meet them from
+the waterless ravine as if its floor were Tophet's lid and the devil
+busy under it, stoking.
+
+It was midday when at last they stood on bottom and swayed like men in a
+dream fingering their bruises and scarcely able for the heat haze to
+see the tangled mass of stone towers and mud-and-stone walls that faced
+them, a mile away. Nobody challenged them yet. Khinjan itself seemed
+dead, crackled in the heat.
+
+"Sahib, let us mount the hill again and wait for night and a cool
+breeze!" urged Darya Khan.
+
+Ismail clucked into his beard and spat to wet his lips.
+
+"This glare makes my eyes ache!" he grumbled.
+
+"Wait, sahib! Wait a while!" urged the others.
+
+"Forward!" ordered King. "This must be Tophet. Know ye not that none
+come out of Tophet by the way they entered in? Forward! The exit is
+beyond!"
+
+They staggered after him, sheltering their eyes and faces from the
+glare with turban-ends and odds and ends of clothing. The animals swayed
+behind them with hung heads and drooping ears, and neither man nor beast
+had sense enough left to have detected an ambush. They were more than
+half-way across the valley, hunting for shadow where none was to be
+found, when a shotted salute brought them up all-standing in a cluster.
+Six or eight nickel-coated bullets spattered on the rocks close by, and
+one so narrowly missed King that he could feel its wind.
+
+Up went all their hands together, and they held them so until they
+ached. Nothing whatever happened. Their arms ceased aching and grew
+numb.
+
+"Forward!" ordered King.
+
+After another quarter of a mile of stumbling among hot boulders, not
+one of which was big enough to afford cover, or shelter from the sun,
+another volley whistled over them. Their hands went up again, and this
+time King could see turbaned heads above a parapet in front. But nothing
+further happened.
+
+"Forward!" he ordered.
+
+They advanced another two hundred yards and a third volley rattled
+among the rocks on either hand, frightening one of the mules so that it
+stumbled and fell and had to be helped up again. When that was done,
+and the mule stood trembling, they all faced the wall. But they were too
+weary to hold their hands up any more. Thirst had begun to exercise its
+sway. One of the men was half delirious.
+
+"Who are ye?" howled a human being, whose voice was so like a wolf's
+that the words at first had no meaning. He peered over the parapet,
+a hundred feet above, with his head so swathed in dirty linen that he
+looked like a bandaged corpse.
+
+"What will ye? Who comes uninvited into Khinjan?"
+
+King bethought him of Yasmini's talisman. He, held it up, and the gold
+band glinted in the sun. Yet, although a Hillman's eyes are keener than
+an eagle's, he did not believe the thing could be recognized at that
+angle, and from that distance. Another thought suggested itself to him.
+He turned his head and caught Ismail in the act of signaling with both
+hands.
+
+"Ye may come!" howled the watchman on the parapet, disappearing
+instantly.
+
+King trembled--perhaps as a racehorse trembles at the starting gate,
+though he was weary enough to tremble from fatigue. The "Hills," that
+numb the hearts of many men, had not cowed him, for he loved them and
+in love there is no fear. Heat and cold an hunger were all in the day's
+work; thirst was an incident; and the whistle of lead in the wind had
+never meant more to him than work ahead to do.
+
+But a greyhound trembles in the leash. A boiler, trembles when word goes
+down the speaking-tube from the bridge for "all she's got." And so
+the mild-looking hakim Kurram Khan, walking gingerly across her rocks,
+donning cheap, imitation shell-rimmed spectacles to help him look the
+part, trembled even more than the leg-weary horse he led.
+
+But that passed. He was all in hand when he led his men up over a rough
+stone causeway to a door in the bottom of a high battlemented wall and
+waited for somebody to open it.
+
+The great teak door looked as if it had been stolen from some Hindu
+temple, and he wondered how and when they could have brought it there
+across those savage intervening miles. With its six-inch teak planks
+and bronze bolts its weight must be guessed at in tons--yet a horse can
+hardly carry a man along any of the trails that lead to Khinjan!
+
+The wood bore the marks of siege and fracture repair. The walls were
+new-built, of age-old stone. The last expedition out of India had
+leveled every bit of those defenses flat with the valley, but Khinjan's
+devils had reerected them, as ants rebuild a rifled nest.
+
+The door was swung open after a time, pulled by a rope, manipulated from
+above by unseen hands. Inside was another blind wall, twenty feet behind
+the first. To the right a low barricade blocked the passage and provided
+a safe vantage point from which it could be swept by a hail of lead;
+but to the left a path ran unobstructed for more than a hundred yards
+between the walls, to where the way was blocked by another teak door,
+set in unscalable black rock. High above the door was a ledge of rock
+that crossed like a bridge from wall to wall, with a parapet of stone
+built upon it, pierced for rifle-fire.
+
+As they approached this second door a Rangar turban, not unlike King's
+own, appeared above the parapet on the ledge and a voice he recognized
+hailed him good-humoredly.
+
+"Salaam aleikoum!"
+
+"And upon thee be peace!" King answered in the Pashtu tongue, for the
+"Hills" are polite, whatever the other principles.
+
+Rewa Gunga's face beamed down on him, wreathed in smiles that seemed to
+include mockery as well as triumph. Looking up at him at an angle that
+made his neck ache and dazzled his eyes, King could not be sure, but it
+seemed to him that the smile said, "Here you are, my man, and aren't you
+in for it?" He more than half suspected he was intended to understand
+that. But the Rangar's conversation took another line.
+
+"By jove!" he chuckled. "She expected you. She guessed you are a hound
+who can hunt well on a dry scent, and she dared bet you will come in
+spite of all odds! But she didn't expect you in Rangar dress! No, by
+jove! You jolly well will take the wind out of her sails!"
+
+King made no answer. For one thing, the word "hound," even in English,
+is not essentially a compliment. But he had a better reason than that.
+
+"Did you find the way easily?" the Rangar asked but King kept silence.
+
+"Is he parched? Have they cut his tongue out on the road?"
+
+That question was in Pashtu, directed at Ismail and the others, but King
+answered it.
+
+"Oh, as for that," he said, salaaming again in the fastidious manner
+of a native gentleman, "I know no other tongue than Pashtu and my own
+Rajasthani. My name is Kurram Khan. I ask admittance."
+
+He held up his wrist to show the gold bracelet, and high over his head
+the Rangar laughed like a bell.
+
+"Shabash!" he laughed. "Well done! Enter, Kurram Khan, and be welcome,
+thou and thy men. Be welcome in her name!"
+
+Somebody pulled a rope and the door yawned wide, giving on a kind of
+courtyard whose high walls allowed no view of anything but hot blue sky.
+King hurried under the arch and looked up, but on the courtyard side of
+the door the wall rose sheer and blank, and there was no sign of window
+or stairs, or of any means of reaching the ledge from which the Rangar
+had addressed him. What he did see, as he faced that way, was that
+each of his men salaamed low and covered his face with both hands as he
+entered.
+
+"Whom do ye salute?" he asked.
+
+Ismail stared back at him almost insolently, as one who would rebuke a
+fool.
+
+"Is this not her nest these days?" he answered. "It is well to bow low.
+She is not as other women. She is she! See yonder!"
+
+Through a gap under an arch in a far corner of the courtyard came a
+one-eyed, lean-looking villain in Afridi dress who leaned on a long gun
+and stared at them under his hand. After a leisurely consideration of
+them he rubbed his nose slowly with one finger, spat contemptuously, and
+then used the finger to beckon them, crooking it queerly and turning on
+his heel. He did not say one word.
+
+King led the way after him on foot, for even in the "Hills" where
+cruelty is a virtue, a man may be excused, on economic grounds, for
+showing mercy to his beast. His men tugged the weary animals along
+behind him, through the gap under the arch and along an almost
+interminable, smelly maze of alleys whose sides were the walls of square
+stone towers, or sometimes of mud-and-stone-walled compounds, and here
+and there of sheer, slab-sided cliff.
+
+At intervals they came to bolted narrow doors, that probably led up to
+overhead defenses. Not fifty yards of any alley was straight; not a yard
+but what was commanded from overhead. Khinjan bad been rebuilt since its
+last destruction by some expert who knew all about street fighting. Like
+Old Jerusalem, the place could have contained a civil war of a hundred
+factions, and still have opposed stout resistance to an outside army.
+
+Alley gave on to courtyard, and filthy square to alley, until
+unexpectedly at last a seemingly blind passage turned sharply and opened
+on a straight street, of fair width, and more than half a mile long. It
+is marked "Street of the Dwellings" on the secret army maps, and it has
+been burned so often by Khinjan rioters, as well as by expeditions out
+of India, that a man who goes on a long journey never expects to find it
+the same on his return.
+
+It was lined on either hand with motley dwellings, out of which a
+motlier crowd of people swarmed to stare at King and his men. There were
+houses built of stolen corrugated iron-that cursed, hot, hideous stuff
+that the West has inflicted on an all-too-willing East; others of
+wood--of stone--of mud--of mat of skins--even of tent-cloth. Most of
+them were filthy. A row of kites sat on the roof of one, and in the
+gutter near it three gorged vultures sat on the remains of a mule.
+Scarcely a house was fit to be defended, for Khinjan's fighting men all
+possess towers, that are plastered about the overfrowning mountain like
+wasp nests on a wall. These were the sweepers, the traders, the loose
+women, the mere penniless and the more or less useful men--not Khinjan's
+inner guard by any means.
+
+There were Hindus--sycophants, keepers of accounts and writers to
+the chiefs (since literacy is at premium in these parts). In proof of
+Khinjan's catholic taste and indiscriminate villainy, there were
+women of nearly every Indian breed and caste, many of them stolen into
+shameful slavery, but some of them there from choice. And there were
+little children--little naked brats with round drum tummies, who
+squealed and shrilled and stared with bold eyes; some of them were
+pretending to be bandits on their own account already, and one flung a
+stone that missed King by an inch. The stone fell in the gutter on the
+far side and, started a fight among the mangy street curs, which
+proved a diversion and probably saved King's party from more accurate
+attentions.
+
+Perhaps a thousand souls came out to watch, all told. Not an eye of them
+all missed the government marks on King's trappings, or the government
+brand on the mules, and after a minute or two, when the procession was
+half-way down the street, a man reproved the child who had thrown
+a stone, and he was backed up by the others. They classified King
+correctly, exactly as he meant they should. As a hakim--a man of
+medicine--he could fill a long-felt want; but by the brand on his
+accouterments he walked an openly avowed robber, and that made him a
+brother in crime. Somebody cuffed the next child who picked up a stone.
+
+He knew the street of old, although it had changed perhaps a dozen times
+since he had seen it. It was a cul-de-sac, and at the end of it, just
+as on his previous visit, there stood a stone mosque, whose roof leaned
+back at a steep angle against the mountain-side. The fact that it was a
+mosque, and that it was the only building used as such in Khinjan,
+had saved it from being leveled to the ground by the last British
+expedition.
+
+It was a famous mosque in its way, for the bed-sheet of the Prophet is
+known to hang in it, preserved against the ravages of time and the touch
+of infidels by priceless Afghan rugs before and behind, so that it hangs
+like a great thin sandwich before the rear stone wall. King had seen
+it. Very vividly he recalled his almost exposure by a suspicious mullah,
+when he had crept nearer to examine it at close range. For the Secret
+Service must probe all things.
+
+There had been an attempt since his last visit to make the mosque's
+exterior look more in keeping with the building's use. It was cleaner.
+It had been smeared with whitewash. A platform had been built on the
+roof for the muezzin. But it still looked more like a fort than a place
+of worship.
+
+Toward it the one-eyed ruffian led the way, with the long,
+leisurely-seeming gait of a mountaineer. At the door, in the middle of
+the end of the street, he paused and struck on the lintel three times
+with his gun-butt. And that was a strange proceeding, to say the least,
+in a land where the mosque is public resting place for homeless ones,
+and all the "faithful" have a right to enter.
+
+A mullah, shaven like a mummy for some unaccountable reason--even his
+eyebrows and eyelashes had been removed--pushed his bare head through
+the door and blinked at them. There was some whispering and more
+staring, and at last the mullah turned his back.
+
+The door slammed. The one-eyed guide grounded his gun-butt on the
+stone, and the procession waited, watched by the crowd that had lost its
+interest sufficiently to talk and joke.
+
+In two minutes the mullah returned and threw a mat over the threshold.
+It turned out to be the end of a long narrow strip that he kicked and
+unrolled in front of him all across the floor of the mosque. After that
+it was not so astonishing that the horses and mules were allowed to
+enter.
+
+"Which proves I was right after all!" murmured King to himself.
+
+In a steel box at Simla is a memorandum, made after his former visit
+to the place, to the effect that the entrance into Khinjan Caves might
+possibly be inside the mosque. Nobody had believed it likely, and he
+had not more than half favored it himself; but it is good, even when
+the next step may lead into a death-trap, to see one's first opinions
+confirmed.
+
+He nodded to himself as the outer door slammed shut behind them, for
+that was another most unusual circumstance.
+
+A faint light shone through slit-like windows, changing darkness into
+gloom, and little more than vaguely hinting at the Prophet's bed-sheet.
+But for a section of white wall to either side of it, the relic might
+have seemed part of the shadows. The mullah stood with his back to it
+and beckoned King nearer. He approached until he could see the pattern
+on the covering rugs, and the pink rims round the mullah's lashless
+eyes.
+
+"What is thy desire?" the mullah asked--as a wolf might ask what a lamb
+wants.
+
+Supposing Yasmini to be jealous of invasion of her realm, King did not
+doubt she would be glad to have him break down at this point. Until he
+had actually gained access to her, nobody could reasonably charge her
+with his safety. If he had been done to death in the Khyber, the sirkar
+would have known it in a matter of hours. If he were killed here they
+might never know it.
+
+"Answer!" said the mullah. "What is thy desire?"
+
+"Audience with her!" he answered, and showed the gold bracelet on his
+wrist.
+
+The red eye-rims of the mullah blinked a time or two, and though he
+did not salute the bracelet, as others had invariably done, his manner
+underwent a perceptible change.
+
+"That is proof that she knows thee. What is thy name."
+
+"Kurram Khan."
+
+"And thy business?"
+
+"Hakim."
+
+"We need thee in Khinjan Caves! But none enter who have not earned right
+to enter! There is but one key. Name it!"
+
+King drew in his breath. He had hoped Yasmini's talisman would prove to
+be key enough. The nails his left hand nearly pierced the palm, but he
+smiled pleasantly.
+
+"He who would enter must slay a man before witnesses in the teeth of
+written law!" he said.
+
+"And thou?"
+
+"I slew an Englishman!" The boast made his blood run cold, but his
+expression was one of sinful pride.
+
+"Whom? When? Where?"
+
+"Athelstan King--a British arrficer--sent on his way to these 'Hills' to
+spy!"
+
+It was like having spells cast on himself to order!
+
+"Where is his body?"
+
+"Ask the vultures! Ask the kites!"
+
+"And thy witnesses?"
+
+Hoping against hope, King turned and waved his hand. As he did so, being
+quick-eyed, he saw Ismail drive an elbow home into Darya Khan's ribs, an
+caught a quick interchange of whispers.
+
+"These men are all known to me," said the mullah. "They all have right
+to enter here. They have right to testify. Did ye see him slay his man?"
+
+"Aye!" lied Ismail, prompt as friend can be.
+
+"Aye!" lied Darya Khan, fearful of Ismail's elbow.
+
+"Then, enter!" said the priest resignedly, as one admits a communicant
+against his better judgment.
+
+He turned his back on them so as to face the Prophet's bed-sheet and
+the rear wall, and in that minute a hairy hand gripped King's arm from
+behind, and Ismail's voice hissed hot-breathed in his ear.
+
+"Ready of tongue! Ready of wit! Who told thee I would lie to save thy
+skin? Be thy kismet as thy courage, then--but I am hers, not thy man!
+Hers, thou light of life--though God knows I love thee!"
+
+The mullah seized the Prophet's bed-sheet and its covering rugs in both
+hands, with about as much reverence as salesmen show for what they keep
+in stock. The whole lot slid to one side by means of noisy rings on a
+rod, and a wall lay bare, built of crudely cut but very well laid stone
+blocks. It appeared to reach unbroken across the whole width of the
+mosque's interior.
+
+On the floor lay a mallet, a peculiar thing of bronze, cast in one
+piece, handle and all. The mullah took it in his band and struck the
+stone floor sharply once--then twice again--then three times--then a
+dozen times in quick succession. The floor rang hollow at that spot.
+
+After about a minute there came one answering hammer-stroke from beyond
+the wall. Then the mullah laid the mallet down and though King ached to
+pick it up and examine it he did not dare.
+
+Excitement now was probably the least of his emotions. It had been
+swallowed in interest. But in his guise of hakim he had to beware of
+that superficial western carelessness, that permits folk to acknowledge
+themselves frightened or excited or amused. His business was to attract
+as little attention to himself as possible; and to that end he folded
+his hands and looked reverent, as if entering some Mecca of his dreams.
+Through his horn-rimmed spectacles his eyes looked far-away and dreamy.
+But it would have been a mistake to suppose that a detail was escaping
+him.
+
+The irregular lines in the masonry began to be more pronounced. All at
+once the wall shook and they gaped by an inch or two, as happens when an
+earthquake has shaken buildings without bringing anything down. Then an
+irregular section of wall began to move quite smoothly away in front of
+him, leaving a gap through which eight men abreast could have marched.
+
+As it receded be observed that the lowest course stones was laid on
+a bronze foundation, that keyed in wide bronze grooves. There was oil
+enough in the grooves to have greased a ship's ways and there neither
+squeak nor tremor as the tons of masonry slid back.
+
+At the end of perhaps three minutes that section of the wall had become
+the fourth side of a twenty-foot-wide island that stood fair in the
+middle of a tunnel, splitting it in two to right and left. Judging by
+the angle of the two divisions they became one again before going very
+far.
+
+The mullah stood aside and motioned King to enter. But the one-eyed
+guide who had led them to the mosque thrust himself between Darya Khan
+and Ismail, pushed King aside and took the lead.
+
+"Nay!" he said, "I am responsible to her."
+
+It was the first time he had spoken and he appeared to resent the waste
+of words.
+
+The tunnel that led to the left was pierced in twenty places in the roof
+for rifle-fire; a score of men with enough ammunition could have held
+it forever against an army. But the right-hand way looked undefended.
+Nevertheless, the guide led to the left, and King followed him, filled
+with curiosity.
+
+"Many have entered!" sang the lashless mullah in a sing-song chant.
+"More have sought to enter! Some who remained without were wisest! I
+count them! I keep count! Many went in! Not all came out again by this
+road!"
+
+"Then there is another road?" King wondered, but he held his tongue and
+followed the guide.
+
+It proved to be fifty yards through part natural, part hand-hewn, tunnel
+to the neck of the fork where the left--and right-hand passages became
+one again. He stopped at the fork and looked back, for none of his men
+was following.
+
+He caught the sound of scuffling of clattering hoofs, and grunts and
+shouted oaths--and started to run back, since even a native hakim may
+protect his own, should he care to, even in the "Hills."
+
+For the sake of principle he chose the other passage, for Cocker says,
+"Look! Look! Look!" But the guide seized him by the arm from behind and
+swung him back again.
+
+"Not that way!" he growled. But he offered no explanation.
+
+In the "Hills" it is not good to ask "why" of strangers. It is good
+to be glad one was not knifed, and to be deferent until more suitable
+occasion. King started to run again, but this time along the same
+defended passage down which they had come. And now the guide made no
+objection but leaned on his long gun and waited.
+
+The charger proved to be making the trouble--the horse that King had
+exchanged with the jezailchi in the Khyber. The terrified brute was
+refusing to enter the passage, and all the men, including Ismail and the
+mullah, were shoving, or else tugging at the reins.
+
+At the moment King appeared the united strength of six men was beginning
+to prevail. The mullah let go the reins, and in that instant the horse
+saw King advance toward him out of the tunnel; so, after the manner of
+horses, he chose the other passage. King ran at full speed round
+the corner after him, remembering that the guide had admitted
+responsibility, and therefore that the chances were he would be rescued
+should he run into a trap.
+
+Suddenly, ten yards in the lead down the dark tunnel the horse threw his
+weight back with a clatter of sparks and screamed as only a horse can.
+After that there was neither sight nor sound of him.
+
+Creeping forward with both arms outstretched against the left-hand wall,
+he reached the spot where, the horse had been, and shuddered on the
+smooth dark edge of a hole that went the full width of the floor. There
+came whispering up out of it, and a dank wet smell, as if there were
+running water a mile away below. He could feel that a little air flowed
+downward into it. Twenty yards away on the far side the path resumed,
+but there was neither hand nor foothold on the smooth damp
+walls between. He went back to his men with a shiver between his
+shoulder-blades, and the mullah, standing in the gap of the mosque wall,
+blinked at him with lashless eyes.
+
+"Many have entered," he chanted maliciously. "Some went out by a
+different road!"
+
+"Come!" Ismail growled at the other men, seizing the mule's bridle
+himself and leading to the left. "The ghosts will have a charger now for
+their captain to ride! Lead on, Hakim sahib!"
+
+"Come!" called the one-eyed guide from the neck of the fork ahead. And
+as they all pressed forward after King the hairless mullah gave a
+signal and the great stone door slid slowly into place. It was like a
+tombstone. It was as if the world that mortals know were a thing of the
+forgotten past and the underworld lay ahead.
+
+"Lead along, Charon!" King grinned. He needed some sort of pleasantry
+to steady his nerves. But even so he wondered what the nerves of India
+would be like if her millions knew of this place.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+
+
+
+     Oh, Abdul trod with a martial tread,
+     Swinging his scimiter's weight.
+     "I am overlord here," he said,
+     "And he who wishes may chance his head,
+     "For my blade is long, and my arm is strong,
+     "And the goods of the world to the bold belong!"
+     So Abdul guarded the gate.
+
+     Many a head did Abdul cleave,
+     Turban and crown and chin,
+     For all the 'venturers sought to know
+     What it could be he guarded so.
+     And since none give but eke receive,
+     A thrust in his ribs made Abdul grieve
+     For good blood outpourin'.
+
+     His men wept, watching Abdul bleed
+     And life's light waning dim,
+     Till he cursed them. "Open the fort gate wide!
+     To saddle, and scour the countryside
+     For a leech!" he swore.  "God rot ye, ride!"
+     'Twas thus, in the guise of a friend in need,
+     His enemy came to him.
+
+
+The second gap closed up behind them and the tunnel began to echo
+weirdly. The mule was the next to be panic-stricken. The noise of
+his plunging increased the echoes a thousand times and multiplied his
+fright, until the poor brute collapsed into meek obedience at last.
+But the guide strode on unconcerned with his easy Hillman gait, neither
+deigning to glance back nor making any verbal comment.
+
+Over their heads, at irregular intervals, there were holes that if they
+led as King presumed into caves above, left not an inch of all the
+long passage that could not have been swept by rifle-fire. It was
+impregnable; for no artillery heavy enough to pound the mountain into
+pieces could ever be dragged within range. Whatever hiding place this
+entrance guarded could be held forever, given food and cartridges!
+
+The tunnel wound to right and left like a snake, growing lighter and
+lighter after each bend; and soon their own din began to be swallowed in
+a greater one that entered from the farther end. After two sharp turns
+they came out unexpectedly into the blaze of blue day, nearly stunned by
+light and sound. A road came up from below like that of an ocean in the
+grip of a typhoon.
+
+When his wits recovered from the shock, King struggled with a wild
+desire to yell, for before him, was what no servant of British India had
+ever seen and lived to tell about, and that is an experience more potent
+than unbroken rum.
+
+They had emerged from a round-mouthed tunnel--it looked already like a
+rabbit-hole, so huge was the cliff behind--on to a ledge of rock that
+formed a sort of road along one side of a mile-wide chasm. Above him, it
+seemed a mile up, was blue sky, to which limestone walls ran sheer, with
+scarcely a foothold that could be seen. Beneath, so deep that eyes
+could not guess how deep, yawned the stained gorge of the underworld,
+many-colored, smooth and wet.
+
+And out of a great, jagged slit in the side of the cliff, perhaps a
+thousand feet below them, there poured down into thunderous dimness a
+waterfall whose breadth seemed not less than half a mile. It spouted
+seventy or eighty yards before it began to curve, and its din was like
+the voice of all creation.
+
+Ismail came and stood by King in silence, taking his hand, as a little
+child might. Presently he stooped and picked up a stone and tossed it
+over.
+
+"Gone!" he said simply. "That down there is Earth's Drink!"
+
+"And this is the 'Heart of the Hills' men boast about?"
+
+"Nay! It is not!" snapped Ismail.
+
+"Then, where--"
+
+But the one-eyed guide beckoned impatiently, and King led the way after
+him, staring as hakim or prisoner or any man had right to do on first
+admission to such wonders. Not to have stared would have been to
+proclaim himself an idiot.
+
+The least of all the wonders was that the secret of the place should
+have been kept all down the centuries; for it was the hollow middle of
+a limestone mountain, that could neither be looked down into from
+above, because the heights were not scalable, nor guessed at from the
+conformation of the country. The river, that flowed out of rock and went
+plunging down into the chasm, must be snow from the Himalayan peaks, on
+its way to swell the sea. There was no other way to account for that;
+but that explanation did explain why at least one Indian river is no
+greater than it is.
+
+The road they followed was a fold in the natural rock, rising and
+falling and curving like a ribbon, but tending on the average downward.
+It looked to be about two miles to the point where it curved at the
+chasm's end and swept round and downward, to be lost in a fissure in the
+cliff.
+
+They soon began to pass the mouths of caves. Some were above the road,
+now and then at crazy heights above it, reached by artificial steps hewn
+out of the stone. Others were below, reached from the road by means of
+ladders, that trembled and swayed over the dizzying waterfall. Most of
+the caves were inhabited, for armed men and sullen women came to their
+entrances to stare.
+
+Ears grow accustomed to the sound of water sooner than to almost
+anything. It was not long before King's ears could catch the patter of
+his men's feet following, and the shod clink of the mule. He could hear
+when Ismail whispered:
+
+"Be brave, little hakim! She loves fearless men."
+
+As the track descended caves became more numerous. In one there were
+horses, for as they passed there came a whiff of unclean stables, and
+the litter of fodder and dung was all about the entrance. The mouths
+of other caves were sealed, with great wax disks, strangely stamped,
+affixed to stout wooden doors. One cave smelt as if oil were stored in
+it, and King wondered whence the oil was brought--for the sirkar knows
+to a pint and an ounce what products travel up and down the Khyber.
+
+At last the guide halted, in the middle of a short steep slope where the
+path was less than six feet wide and a narrow cave mouth gave directly
+on to it.
+
+"Be content to rest here!" he said, pointing.
+
+"Thy cave?" asked King.
+
+"Nay. God's! I am the caretaker!"
+
+(The "Hills" are very pious and polite, between the acts of robbing and
+shedding blood.)
+
+"Allah, then, reward thee, brother!" answered King. "Allah give sight to
+thy blind eye! Allah give thee children! Allah give thee peace, and to
+all thy house!"
+
+The guide salaamed, half-mockingly, half-wondering at such eloquence,
+pausing in the passage to point into the side-caves that debouched to
+either hand. There was a niche of a place, where a man might lie on
+guard near the entrance; another cave in which horses could be stabled,
+with plenty of fodder piled up ready; another beyond that for servants
+and baggage, with a fireplace and cooking pots; and at the last at the
+rear of all a great cavern full of eerie gloom, that opened out from the
+end of the passage like a bottle at the end of a long neck.
+
+Peering about him into vastness, King became aware of frame beds, placed
+at intervals in a row, each with a mat beside it. And there were several
+brass basins and ewers for water. Also there were some little bronze
+lamps; the guide lit three of them, and King took up one to examine it.
+As he did so, involuntarily his hand almost went to his bosom, where the
+strange knife still reposed that he had taken from the would-be murderer
+in the train to Delhi.
+
+There was no gold on the lamp; but the handle by which he lifted it had
+been cast, the devils of the Himalayas only knew how many centuries ago,
+in the form of a woman dancing; her size, and her shape, and the art
+with which she had been fashioned, were the same as the handle of the
+knife.
+
+Watching him as a wolf eyes another one, the strange guide found his
+tongue.
+
+"How many such hast thou ever seen?" he asked.
+
+"None!" answered King, and the guide cackled at him, like a hen that has
+laid an egg.
+
+"There be many strange things in Khinjan, but few strangers!" he
+remarked; and then, as if that were enough for any man to say on any
+occasion, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the cavern. It was
+the last King ever saw of him. He followed him down the passage to the
+entrance and watched him until his back disappeared round the first
+bend, but the man never turned his head once. He did not even look over
+the edge of the road, down into the amazing waterfall, nor up to the
+round disk of sky.
+
+King turned back and looked into the other caves--saw the weary horse
+and mule fed, watered and bedded down--took note of the running water
+that rushed out of a rock fissure and gurgled out of sight down another
+one--examined the servants' cave and saw that they had been amply
+provided with blankets. There was nothing lacking that the most exacting
+traveler could have demanded at such a distance from civilization. There
+was more than the most exacting would have dared expect.
+
+"Why isn't it damp in here?" he wondered, returning to his own cave. And
+then he noticed long fissures in the cavern walls, and that the smoke
+from the lamps drifted toward them. He could not guess what made it
+do that, unless it were the suction of the enormous river hurrying
+underground; and then he remembered that at the entrance air had rushed
+downward into the hole down which the horse had disappeared, which
+partly confirmed his guess.
+
+"Ismail!" he shouted, and jumped at the revolver-crack--like echo of his
+voice.
+
+Ismail came running.
+
+"Make the men carry the mule's packs into this cave. You and Darya Khan
+stay here and help me open them. Remember, ye are both assistants of
+Kurram Khan, the hakim!"
+
+"They will laugh at us! They will laugh at us!" clucked Ismail, but he
+hurried to obey, while King wondered who would laugh.
+
+Within an hour a delegation came from no less a person than Yasmini
+herself, bearing her compliments, and hot food savory enough to make
+a brass idol's mouth water. By that time King had his sets of surgical
+instruments and drugs and bandages all laid out on one of the beds and
+covered from view by a blanket.
+
+It was only one more proof of the British army's everlasting luck that
+one of the men, who set the great brass dish of food on the floor
+near King, had a swollen cheek, and that he should touch the swelling
+clumsily, as he lifted his hand to shake back a lock of greasy hair.
+
+There followed an oath like flint struck on steel ten times in rapid
+succession.
+
+"Does it pain thee, brother?" asked Kurram Khan the hakim.
+
+"Are there devils in Tophet! Fire and my veins are one!"
+
+The man did not notice the eagerness beaming out of King's horn-rimmed
+spectacles, but Ismail did; it seemed to him time to prove his virtues
+as assistant.
+
+"This is the famous hakim Kurram Khan," he boasted. "He can cure
+anything, and for a very little fee!"
+
+"Nay, for no fee at all in this case!" said King.
+
+The man looked incredulous, but King drew the covering from his row of
+instruments and bottles.
+
+"Take a chance!" he advised. "None but the brave wins anything!"
+
+The man sat down, as if he would argue the point at length, but Ismail
+and Darya Khan were new to the business and enthusiastic. They had him
+down, held tight on the floor to the huge amusement of the rest, before
+the man could even protest; and his howls of rage did him no good, for
+Ismail drove the hilt of a knife between his open jaws to keep them
+open.
+
+A very large proportion of King's stores consisted of morphia and
+cocaine. He injected enough cocaine to deaden the man's nerves, and
+allowed it time to work. Then he drew out three back teeth in quick
+succession, to make sure he had the right one.
+
+Ismail let the victim up, and Darya Khan gave him water in a brass
+cup. Utterly without pain for the first time for days, the man was as
+grateful as a wolf freed from a trap.
+
+"Allah reward thee, since the service was free!" he smirked.
+
+"Are there any others in pain in Khinjan?" King asked him.
+
+"Listen to him! What is Khinjan? Is there one man without a wound or a
+sore or a scar or a sickness?"
+
+"Then, tell them," said King.
+
+The man laughed.
+
+"When I show my jaw, there will be a fight to be first! Make ready,
+hakim! I go!"
+
+He was true to his word and left the cave like a gust of wind, followed
+by the three who had come with him. King sat down to eat, but he had not
+finished his meal--he had made the last little heap of rice into a
+ball with his fingers, native style, and was mopping up the last of the
+curried gravy with it--when the advance guard of the lame and the halt
+and the sick made its appearance. The cave's entrance became jammed with
+them, and no riot ever made more noise.
+
+"Hakim! Ho, hakim! Where is the hakim who draws teeth? Where is the man
+who knows yunani?"
+
+Ten men burst down the passage all together, all clamoring, and one man
+wasted no time at all but began to tear away bloody bandages to show his
+wound. The hardest thing now was to get and keep some kind of order,
+and for ten minutes Ismail and Darya Khan labored, using threats where
+argument failed, and brute force when they dared. It was like beating
+mad hounds from off their worry. What established order at last was that
+King rolled up his sleeves and began, so that eagerness gave place to
+wonder.
+
+The "Hills" are not squeamish in any one particular; so that the fact
+that the cave became a shambles upset nobody. The surgeon's thrill that
+makes even half-amateurs oblivious of all but the work in hand,
+coupled with the desperate need of winning this first trick, made King
+horror-proof; and nobody waiting for the next turn was troubled because
+the man under the knife screamed a little or bled more than usual.
+
+When they died--and more than one did die--men carried them out and
+flung them over the precipice into the waterfall below.
+
+Ismail and Darya Khan became choosers of the victims. They seized a man,
+laid him on the bed, tore off his disgusting bandages and held their
+breath until the awful resulting stench had more or less dispersed. Then
+King would probe or lance or bandage as he saw fit, using anaesthetics
+when he must, but managing mostly without them.
+
+They almost flung money at him. Few of them asked what his fee would
+be. Those who had no money brought him shawls, and swords, and even
+clothing. Two or three brought old-fashioned fire-arms; but they were
+men who did not expect to live. And King accepted every gift without
+comment, because that was in keeping with the part he played. He tossed
+money and clothes and every other thing they gave him into a corner at
+the back of the cave, and nobody tried to steal them back, although a
+man suspected of honesty in that company would have been tortured to
+death as an heretic and would have had no sympathy.
+
+For hour after gruesome hour he toiled over wounds and sores such as
+only battles and evil living can produce, until men began to come at
+last with fresh wounds, all caused by bullets, wrapped in bandages on
+which the blood had caked but had not grown foul.
+
+"There has been fighting in the Khyber," somebody, informed him, and
+he stopped with lancet in mid-air to listen, scanning a hundred faces
+swiftly in the smoky lamplight. There were ten men who held lamps for
+him, one of them a newcomer, and it was he who spoke.
+
+"Fighting in the Khyber! Aye! We were a little lashkar, but we drove
+them back into their fort! Aye! we slew many!"
+
+"Not a jihad yet?" King asked, as if the world might be coming to an
+end. The words were startled out of him. Under other circumstances
+he would never have asked that question so directly; but he had
+lost reckoning of everything but these poor devils' dreadful need of
+doctoring, and he was like a man roused out of a dream. If a holy war
+had been proclaimed already, then he was engaged on a forlorn hope. But
+the man laughed at him.
+
+"Nay, not yet. Bull-with-a-beard holds back yet. This was a little
+fight. The jihad shall come later!"
+
+"And who is 'Bull-with-a-beard'?" King wondered; but he did not ask that
+question because his wits were awake again. It pays not to be in too
+much of a hurry to know things in the "Hills."
+
+As it happened, he asked no more questions, for there came a shout
+at the cave entrance whose purport he did not catch, and within five
+minutes after that, without a word of explanation, the cave was left
+empty of all except his own five men. They carried away the men too sick
+to walk and vanished, snatching the last man away almost before King's
+fingers had finished tying the bandage on his wound.
+
+"Why is that?" he asked Ismail. "Why did they go? Who shouted?"
+
+"It is night," Ismail answered. "It was time."
+
+King stared about him. He had not realized until then that without aid
+of the lamps he could not see his own hand held out in front of him;
+his eyes had grown used to the gloom, like those of the surgeons in the
+sick-bays below the water line in Nelson's fleet.
+
+"But who shouted?"
+
+"Who knows? There is only one here who gives orders. We be many who
+obey," said Ismail.
+
+"Whose men were the last ones?" King asked him, trying a new line.
+
+"Bull-with-a-beard's."
+
+"And whose man art thou, Ismail?"
+
+The Afridi hesitated, and when he spoke at last there was not quite the
+same assurance in his voice as once there had been.
+
+"I am hers! Be thou hers, too! But it is night. Sleep against the toil
+tomorrow. There be many sick in Khinjan."
+
+King made a little effort to clean the cave, but the task was hopeless.
+For one thing he was so weary that his very bones were water; for
+another, Ismail pretended to be equally tired, and when the suggestion
+that they should help was put to the others they claimed their izzat
+indignantly. Izzat and sharm (honor and shame) are the two scarcely
+distinguishable enemies of honest work, into whose teeth it takes both
+nerve and resolution to drive a Hillman at the best of times. Nerve King
+had, but his resolution was asleep. He was too tired to care.
+
+He appointed them to two-hour watches, to relieve one another until
+dawn, and flung himself on a clean bed. He was asleep before his head
+had met the pillow; and for all he knew to the contrary he dreamed of
+Yasmini all night long.
+
+It seemed to him that she came into the cave--she the woman of the faded
+photograph the general had given him in Peshawur--and that the cave
+became filled with the strange intoxicating scent that had first wooed
+his senses in her reception room in Delhi.
+
+He dreamed that she called him by name. First, "King sahib!" Then,
+"Kurram Khan!" And her voice was surprisingly familiar. But dreams are
+strange things.
+
+"He sleeps!" said the same voice presently. "It is good that he sleeps!"
+And in his sleep he thought that a shadowy Ismail grunted an answer.
+
+After that he was very sure in his dream that it was good to sleep,
+although a voice he did not recognize and that he was quite sure was a
+dream-voice, kept whispering to him to wake up and protect himself.
+
+But the scent grew stronger, and he began to dream of cobras, that
+danced with a woman and struck at her so swiftly that she had to become
+two women in order to avoid them; and Rewa Gunga came and laughed at
+both and called them amateurs, so that the woman became enraged and drew
+a bronze-bladed dagger with a golden hilt.
+
+Then intelligible dreams ceased altogether, and he, slept like a dead
+man, but with a vague suggestion ever with him that Yasmini was not
+very far away, and that she was interested in him to a point that was
+actually embarrassing. It was like the ether-dream he once dreamt in a
+hospital.
+
+When he awoke at last it was after dawn, and light shone down the
+passage into his cave.
+
+"Ismail!" he shouted, for he was thirsty. But there was no answer.
+
+"Darya Khan!"
+
+Again there was no answer. He called each of the other men by name with
+the same result.
+
+He got up and realized then for the first time that he had not undressed
+himself the night before. His head felt heavy, and although he did not
+believe he had been drugged, there was a scent he half-recognized that
+permeated the cave, and even overcame the dreadful atmosphere that the
+sick of yesterday had left behind. He decided to go to the cave mouth,
+summon his men, who were no doubt sleeping as he had done, sniff the
+fresh air outside and come back to try the scent again; he would know
+then whether his nose were deceiving him.
+
+But there was no Ismail near the entrance--no Darya Khan--nor any of the
+other men. The horse was gone. So was the mule. So was the harness, and
+everything he had, except the drugs and instruments and the presents
+the sick had given him; he had noticed all those still lying about in
+confusion when he woke.
+
+"Ismail!" he shouted at the top of his lungs, thinking they might all be
+outside.
+
+He heard a man hawk and spit, close to the entrance, and went out to
+see. A man whom he had never seen before leaned on a magazine rifle and
+eyed him as a tiger eyes its prey.
+
+"No farther!" he growled, bringing his rifle to the port.
+
+"Why not?" King asked him.
+
+"Allah! When a camel dies in the Khyber do the kites ask why? Go in!"
+
+He thought then of Yasmini's bracelet, that always gained him at least
+civility from every man who saw it. He held up his left wrist and knew
+that instant why it felt uncomfortable. The bracelet has disappeared!
+
+He turned back into the cave to hunt for it, and the strange scent
+greeted him again. In spite of the surrounding stench of drugs and
+filthy wounds, there was no mistaking it. If it had been her special
+scent in Delhi, as Saunders swore it was, and her special scent on the
+note Darya Khan had carried down the Khyber, then it was hers now, and
+she had been in the cave.
+
+He hunted high and low and found no bracelet.
+
+His pistol was gone, too, and his cartridges, but not the dagger,
+wrapped in a handkerchief, under his shirt. The money, that his patients
+had brought him, lay on the floor untouched. It was an unusual robber
+who had robbed him.
+
+At least once in his life (or he were not human, but an angel) it dawns
+on a man that he has done the unforgivable. It dawns on most men oftener
+than once a week. So men learn sympathy.
+
+"I should have been awake to change the guard every two hours!" he
+admitted, sitting on the bed. "I wouldn't hesitate to shoot another man
+for that--or for less!"
+
+He let the thought sink in, until the very lees of shame tasted like
+ashes in his mouth. Then, being what he was,--and there are not very
+many men good enough to shoulder what lay ahead of him--he set the whole
+affair behind him as part of the past and looked forward.
+
+"Who's 'Bull-with-a-beard'?" he wondered. "Nobody interfered with me
+until I doctored his men. He's in opposition. That's a fair guess. Now,
+who in thunder--by the fat lord Harry--can 'Bull-with-a-beard' be?
+And why fighting in the Khyber so early as all this? And why does
+'Bull-with-a-beard,' whoever he is, hang back?"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+
+
+
+   Are jackals a tiger's friends because they flatter him and eat
+   his leavings?
+   Choose, ye with stripes and proud whiskers, choose between friend
+   and enemy.--Native Proverb
+
+
+They came and changed the guard two hours after dawn, to the
+accompaniment of a lot of hawking and spitting, orders growled through
+the mist, and the crash of rifle-butts grounding on the rock path. King
+went to the cave entrance, to look the new man over; but because he was
+in Khinjan, and Khinjan in the "Hills," where indirectness is the key to
+information, he stood for a while at gaze, listening to the thunder of
+tumbling water and looking at the cliff-edge six feet away that was laid
+like a knife in the ascending mist.
+
+Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that the new man was a
+Mahsudi--no sweeter to look at and no less treacherous for the fact.
+Also, that he had boils all over the back of his neck. He was not likely
+to be better tempered because of that fact, either. But it is an ill
+wind that blows no good to the Secret Service.
+
+"There is an end to everything," he remarked presently, addressing the
+world at large, or as much as he could see of it through the cave mouth.
+"A hill is so high, a pool so deep, a river so wide. How long, for
+instance, must thy watch be?"
+
+"What is that to thee?" the fellow growled.
+
+"There is an end to pain!" said King, adjusting his horn-rimmed
+spectacles. "I lanced a man's boils last night, and it hurt him, but he
+must be well to-day."
+
+"Get in!" growled the guard. "She says it is sorcery! She says none are
+to let thee touch them!"
+
+Plainly, he was in no receptive mood; orders had been spat into his
+hairy ear too recently.
+
+"Get in!" he growled, lifting his rifle-butt as if to enforce the order.
+
+"I can heal boils!" said King, retiring into the cave. Then, from a
+safe distance down the passage, he added a word or two to sink in as the
+hours went by.
+
+"It is good to be able to bend the neck without pain and to rest easily
+at night! It is good not to flinch at another's touch. Boils are bad!
+Healing is easy and good!"
+
+Then, since a quarrel was the very last thing he was looking for, he
+retired into his own gloomy quarters at the rear, taking care to sit so
+that he could see and overhear what passed at the entrance. Among other
+things in the course of the day he noticed that the watch was changed
+every four hours and that there were only three men in the guard, for
+the same man was back again that evening.
+
+At intervals throughout the day Yasmini sent him food by silent
+messengers; so he ate, for "the thing to do," says Cocker, "is the first
+that comes to hand, and the thing not to do is worry." It is not easy to
+worry and eat heartily at one and the same time. Having eaten, he rolled
+up his sleeves and native-made cotton trousers and proceeded to clean
+the cave. After that he overhauled his stock of drugs and instruments,
+repacking them and making ready against opportunity.
+
+"As I told that heathen with a gun out there, there's an end to
+everything!" he reflected. "May this come soon!"
+
+When they changed the guard that afternoon he had grown weary of his
+own company and of fruitless speculation and was pacing up and down. The
+second guard proved even less communicative than the first, up to the
+point when, to lessen his ennui, King began to whistle. Because a Secret
+Service man must be consistent, the tune was not English, but a weird
+minor one to which the "Hills" have set their favorite love song (that
+is, all about hate in the concrete!).
+
+The echo of the waterfall within the cave was like the roaring in a
+shell held to the ear, but each time he came near the entrance the
+new guard could catch a few bars of the tune. After a little while the
+hook-nosed ruffian began to sing the words to it, in a voice like a
+forgotten dog's.
+
+So he stopped at the entrance and changed the tune. And the guard sang
+the words of the new tune, too. After that he came out into the light
+of day (direct sunlight was cut off by the huge height of the cliffs all
+around) and leaned in the entrance, smiling.
+
+"Allah preserve thee, brother!" he remarked. "Thine is a voice like a
+warrior's--bold and big! Thou art a true son of the Prophet!"
+
+"Aye!" said the fellow, "that I am! Allah preserve thee, for thou hast
+more need of it than I, although I guard thee just at present. Whistle
+me another one!"
+
+So King whistled the refrain of a song that boasts of an Afghan invasion
+of India, and of the loot that came of it, and the prisoners, and the
+women--particularly the women, mentioning more than a few of them by
+name, and their charms in detail. It was a song to warm the very cockles
+of a Hillman's heart. Nothing could have been better chosen for that
+setting, of a cave mouth half-way down the side of a gash in earth's
+wildest mountains, with the blue sky resting on a jagged rim a mile
+above.
+
+"Good!" said the bearded jailer. "Now begin again and I will sing!"
+
+He threw his head back and howled until the mountain walls rang with the
+song, and other men in far-off caves took it up and howled it back at
+him. When he left off singing at last, to drink from a water-bottle,
+that surely had been looted from a British soldier, King decided to be
+done with overtures and make the next move in the game.
+
+"Didst thou ever sing for her?" he asked, and the man turned round to
+stare at him as if he were mad, King saw then a blood-soaked bandage on
+the right of his neck, not very far from the jugular.
+
+"When she sings we are silent! When she is silent it is good to wait a
+while and see!" he answered.
+
+"Hah!" said King. "Was that wound got in the Khyber the other day?"
+
+"Nay. Here in Khinjan. I had my thumb in a man's eye, and the bastard
+bit me! May devils do worse to him where he has gone! I threw him into
+Earth's Drink!"
+
+"A good place for one's enemies!" laughed King.
+
+"Aye!"
+
+"A man told me last night," said King, drawing on imagination without
+any compunction at all, "that the fight in the Khyber was because a
+jihad is launched aleady."
+
+"That man lied!" said the guard, shifting position uneasily, as if
+afraid to talk too much.
+
+"So I told him!" answered King. "I told him there never will be another
+jihad."'
+
+"Then art thou a greater liar than he!" the guard answered hotly. "There
+will be a jihad when she is ready, such an one as never yet was! India
+shall bleed for all the fat years she has lain unplundered! Not a throat
+of an unbeliever in the world shall be left un-slit! No jihad? Thou
+liar! Get in out of my sight!"
+
+So King retired into the cave, with something new to think about. Was
+she planning the jihad! Or pretending to plan one? Every once in a while
+the guard leaned far into the cave mouth and buried adjectives at him,
+the mildest of which was a well of information. If his temper was the
+temper of the "Hills," it was easy to read disappointment for a jihad
+that should have been already but had been postponed.
+
+When they changed the guard again the new man proved surly. There was
+no getting a word out of him. He showed dirty yellow teeth in a wolfish
+snarl, and his only answer was a lifted rifle and a crooked forefinger.
+King let him alone and paced the cave for hours.
+
+He was squatting on his bed-end in the dark, like a spectacled image of
+Buddha, when the first of the three men came on guard again and at last
+Ismail came for him holding a pitchy torch that filled the dim passage
+full of acrid smoke and made both of them, cough. Ismail was red-eyed
+with it.
+
+"Come!" he growled. "Come, little hakim!" Then he turned on his heel at
+once, as if afraid of being twitted with desertion. He seemed to want to
+get outside, where he could keep out of range of words, yet not to wish
+to seem unfriendly.
+
+But King made no effort to speak to him, following in silence out on to
+the dark ledge above the waterfall and noticing that the guard with the
+boils was back again on duty. He grinned evilly out of a shadow as King
+passed.
+
+"Make an end!" he advised, spitting over the Cliff into thunderous
+darkness to illustrate the suggestion. "Jump, hakim, before a worse
+thing happens!"
+
+To add further point be kicked a loose stone over the edge, and the
+movement caused him to bend his neck and so inadvertently to hurt his
+boils. He cursed, and there was pity in King's voice when he spoke next.
+
+"Do they hurt thee?"
+
+"Aye, like the devil! Khinjan is a place of plagues!"
+
+"I could heal them," King said, passing on, and the man stared hard.
+
+"Come!" boomed Ismail through the darkness, shaking the torch to make
+it burn better and beckoning impatiently, and King hurried after him,
+leaving behind a savage at the cave mouth who fingered his sores and
+wondered, muttering, leaning on a rifle, muttering and muttering again
+as if he had seen a new light.
+
+Instead of waiting for King to catch up, Ismail began to lead the way at
+great speed along a path that descended gradually until it curved round
+the end of the chasm and plunged into a tunnel where the darkness grew
+opaque. In the tunnel the torch's smoke cast weird shadows on walls and
+roof, and the fitful light only confused, so that Ismail slowed down and
+let him come up close.
+
+Then for thirty minutes he led swiftly down a crazy devil's stairway
+of uneven boulders, stopping to lend a hand at the worst places, but
+everlastingly urging him to hurry. They were both breathless, and King
+was bruised in a dozen places when they reached level going at least six
+or seven hundred feet below the cave from which they started.
+
+Then the hell-mouth gloom began to grow faintly luminous, and the
+waterfall's thunder burst on their ears from close at hand. They emerged
+into fresh wet air and a sea of sound, on a rock ledge like the one
+above. Ismail raised the torch and waved it. The fire and smoke wandered
+up, until they flattened on a moving opal dome, that prisoned all the
+noises in the world.
+
+"Earth's Drink!" he announced, waving the torch and then shutting his
+mouth tight, as if afraid to voice sacrilege.
+
+It was the river, million-colored in the torch-light, pouring from a
+half-mile-long slash in the cliff above them and plunging past them
+through the gloom toward the very middle of the world. Its width was a
+matter of memory, and its depth unguessable, for although dim moonlight
+filtered through it, he did not know where the moon was, nor how far
+such light could penetrate through moving water. Somewhere it met
+rock-bottom and boiled there, for a roar like the sea's came up from
+deeps unimaginable.
+
+He watched the overturning dome until his senses reeled. Then he crawled
+on hands and knees to the ledge's brink and tried to peer over. But
+Ismail dragged him back.
+
+"Come!" he howled; but in all that din his shout was like a whisper.
+
+"How deep is it?" King bellowed back.
+
+"Allah! Ask Him who made it!"
+
+The fear of the falls was on the Afridi, and he tugged at King's arm in
+a frenzy of impatience. Suddenly he let go and broke into a run. King
+trotted after him, afraid too, to look to right or left, lest the
+fear should make him throw himself over the brink. The thunder and the
+hugeness had their grip on him and had begun to numb his power to think
+and his will to be a man. Suddenly when they had run a hundred yards,
+Ismail turned sharp to the right into a tunnel that led straight back
+into the cliff and sloped uphill. As the din of the falls grew less
+behind him and his power to think returned, King calculated that they
+must be following the main direction of the river bed, but edging away
+gradually to the right of it. After ten minutes' hurrying uphill he
+guessed they must be level with the river, in a tunnel running nearly
+parallel.
+
+He proved to be right, for they came to a gap in the wall, and Ismail
+thrust the torch through it. The light shone on swift black water, and a
+wind rushed through the gap that nearly blew the torch out. It accounted
+altogether for the dryness of the rock and the fresh air in the tunnel.
+The river's weight seemed to suck a hurricane along with it--air enough
+for a million men to breathe.
+
+After that there was no more need to stop at intervals and beat the
+torch against the wall to make it burn brightly, for the wind fanned it
+until the flame was nearly white. Ismail kept looking back to bid King
+hurry and never paused once to rest.
+
+"Come!" he urged fiercely. "This leads to the 'Heart of the Hills'!" And
+after that King had to do his best to keep the Afridi's back in sight.
+
+They began after a time to hear voices and to see the smoky glare made
+by other torches. Then Ismail set the pace yet faster, and they became
+the last two of a procession of turbaned men, who tramped along a
+winding tunnel into a great mountain's womb. The sound of slippers
+clicking and rutching on the rock floor swelled and died and swelled
+again as the tunnel led from cavern into cavern.
+
+In one great cave they came to every man beat out his torch and tossed
+it on a heap. The heap was more than shoulder high, and three parts
+covered the floor of the cave. After that there was a ledge above the
+height of a man's head on either side of the tunnel, and along the ledge
+little oil-burning lamps were spaced at measured intervals. They looked
+ancient enough to have been there when the mountain itself was born,
+and although all the brass ones suggested Indian and Hindu origin, there
+were others among them of earthenware that looked like plunder from
+ancient Greece.
+
+It was like a transposition of epochs. King felt already as if the
+twentieth century had never existed, just as he seemed to have left life
+behind for good and all when the mosque door had closed on him.
+
+A quarter of a mile farther along the tunnel opened into another, yet
+greater cave, and there every man kicked off his slippers, without
+seeming to trouble how they lay; they littered the floor unarranged and
+uncared for, looking like the cast-off wing-cases of gigantic beetles.
+
+After that cave there were two sharp turns in the tunnel, and then at
+last a sea of noise and a veritable blaze of light.
+
+Part of the noise made King feel homesick, for out of the mountain's
+very womb brayed a music-box, such as the old-time carousels made use
+of before the days of electricity and steam. It was being worked by
+inexpert hands, for the time was something jerky; but it was robbed of
+its tinny meanness and even majesty by the hugeness of a
+cavern's roof, as well as by the crashing, swinging march it
+played--wild--wonderful--invented for lawless hours and a kingless
+people.
+
+"Marchons!--Citoyens!--"
+
+The procession began to tramp in time to it, and the rock shook. They
+deployed to left and right into a space so vast that the eye at first
+refused to try to measure it. It was the hollow core of a mountain,
+filled by the sea-sound of a human crowd and hung with huge stalactites
+that danced and shifted and flung back a thousand colors at the
+flickering light below.
+
+There was an undertone to the clangor of the music-box and the human
+hum, for across the cavern's farther end for a space of two hundred
+yards the great river rushed, penned here into a deep trough of less
+than a tenth its normal width--plunging out of a great fanged gap and
+hurrying out of view down another one, licking smooth banks on its way
+with a hungry sucking sound. Its depth where it crossed the cavern's
+end could only be guessed by remembering the half-mile breadth of the
+waterfall.
+
+There were little lamps everywhere, perched on ledges amid the
+stalactites, and they suffused the whole cavern in golden glow, made the
+crowd's faces look golden and cast golden shimmers on the cold, black
+river bed. There was scarcely any smoke, for the wind that went like a
+storm down the tunnel seemed to have its birth here; the air was fresh
+and cool and never still. No doubt fresh air was pouring in continually
+through some shaft in the rock, but the shaft was invisible.
+
+In the midst of the cavern a great arena had been left bare, and
+thousands of turbaned men squatted round it in rings. At the end where
+the river formed a tangent to them the rings were flattened, and at that
+point they were cut into by the ramp of a bridge, and by a lane left
+to connect the bridge with the arena. The bridge was almost the most
+wonderful of all.
+
+So delicately formed that fairies might have made it with a guttered
+candle, it spanned the river in one splendid sweep, twenty feet above
+water, like a suspension bridge. Then, so light and graceful that it
+scarcely seemed to touch anything at all, it swept on in irregular
+arches downward to the arena and ceased abruptly as if shorn off by a
+giant ax, at a point less than half-way to it.
+
+Its end formed a nearly square platform, about fourteen feet above
+the floor, and the broad track thence to the arena, as well as all the
+arena's boundary, had been marked off by great earthenware lamps, whose
+greasy smoke streaked up and was lost by the wind among the stalactites.
+
+"Greek lamps, every one of 'em!" King whispered to himself, but he
+wasted no time just then on trying to explain how Greek lamps had ever
+got there. There was too much else to watch and wonder at.
+
+No steps led down from the bridge end to the floor; toward the arena it
+was blind. But from the bridge's farther end across the hurrying water
+stairs had been hewn out of the rock wall and led up to a hole of twice
+a man's height, more than fifty feet above water level.
+
+On either side of the bridge end a passage had been left clear to the
+river edge, and nobody seemed to care to invade it, although it was not
+marked off in any way. Each passage was about fifty feet wide and quite
+straight. But the space between the bridge end and the arena, and the
+arena itself, had to be kept free from trespassers by fifty swaggering
+ruffians armed to the teeth.
+
+Every man of the thousands there had a knife in evidence, but the arena
+guards had magazine rifles well as Khyber tulwars. Nobody else wore
+firearms openly. Some of the arena guards bore huge round shields of
+prehistoric pattern of a size and sort he had never seen before, even
+in museums. But there was very little that he was seeing that night of a
+kind that he had seen before anywhere!
+
+The guards lolled insolently, conscious of brute strength and special
+favor. When any man trespassed with so much as a toe beyond the ring of
+lamps, a guard would slap his rifle-butt until the swivels rattled and
+the offender would scurry into bounds amid the jeers of any who had
+seen.
+
+Shoving, kicking and elbowing with set purpose, Ismail forced a way
+through the already seated crowd, and drew King down into the cramped
+space beside him, close enough to the arena to be able to catch the
+guards' low laughter. But he was restless. He wished to get nearer yet,
+only there seemed no room anywhere in front.
+
+The music-box was hidden. King could see it nowhere. Five minutes after
+he and Ismail were seated it stopped playing. The hum of the crowd died
+too.
+
+Then a guard threw his shield down with a clang and deliberately fired
+his rifle at the roof. The ricocheting bullet brought down a shower of
+splintered stone and stalactite, and he grinned as he watched the
+crowd dodge to avoid it. Before they had done dodging and while he yet
+grinned, a chant began--ghastly--tuneless--so out of time that the words
+were not intelligible--yet so obvious in general meaning that nobody
+could hear it and not understand.
+
+It was a devils' anthem, glorifying hellishness--suggestive of the
+gnashing of a million teeth, and the whicker of drawn blades--more
+shuddersome and mean than the wind of a winter's night. And it ceased as
+suddenly as it had begun.
+
+Another ruffian fired at the roof, and while the crack of the shot yet
+echoed seven other of the arena guards stepped forward with long horns
+and blew a blast. That was greeted by a yell that made the cavern
+tremble.
+
+Instantly a hundred men rose from different directions and raced for the
+arena, each with a curved sword in either hand. The yelling changed back
+into the chant, only louder than before, and by that much more terrible.
+Cymbals crashed. The music-box resumed its measured grinding of The
+Marseillaise. And the hundred began an Afridi sword dance, than which
+there is nothing wilder in all the world. Its like can only be seen
+under the shadow of the "Hills."
+
+Ismail put his hands together and howled through them like a wolf on the
+war-path, nudging King with an elbow. So King imitated him, although one
+extra shout in all that din seemed thrown away.
+
+The dancers pranced in a circle, each man whirling both swords around
+his head and the head of the man in front of him at a speed that passed
+belief. Their long black hair shook and swayed. The sweat began to pour
+from them until their arms and shoulders glistened. The speed increased.
+Another hundred men leaped in, forming a new ring outside the first,
+only facing the other way. Another hundred and fifty formed a ring
+outside them again, with the direction again reversed; and two hundred
+and fifty more formed an outer circle--all careering at the limit of
+their power, gasping as the beasts do in the fury of fighting to the
+death, slitting the air until it whistled, with swords that missed human
+heads by immeasurable fractions of an inch.
+
+Ismail seemed obsessed by the spirit of hell let loose--drawn by it,
+as by a magnet, although subsequent events proved him not to have been
+altogether without a plan. He got up, with his eyes fixed on the dance,
+and dragged King with him to a place ten rows nearer the arena, that had
+been vacated by a dancer. There--two, where there was only rightly
+room for one--he thrust himself and King next to some Orakzai Pathans,
+elbowing savagely to right and left to make room. And patience proved
+scarce. The instant oaths of anything but greeting were like overture to
+a dog fight.
+
+"Bismillah!" swore the nearest man, deigning to use intelligible
+sentences at last. "Shall a dog of an Afridi bustle me?"
+
+He reached for the ever-ready Pathan knife, and Ismail, with both eyes
+on the dancing, neither heard nor saw. The Pathan leaned past King to
+stab, but paused in the instant that his knife licked clear. From a
+swift side-glance at King's face be changed to full stare, his scowl
+slowly giving place to a grin as he recognized him.
+
+"Allah!"
+
+He drove the long blade back again, fidgeting about to make more room
+and kicking out at his next neighbor to the same end, so that presently
+King sat on the rock floor instead of on other men's hip-bones.
+
+"Well met, hakim! See--the wound heals finely!"
+
+Baring his shoulder under the smelly sheepskin coat, he lifted a bandage
+gingerly to show the clean opening out of which King had coaxed a bullet
+the day before. It looked wholesome and ready to heal.
+
+"Name thy reward, hakim! We Orakzai Pathans forget no favors!" (Now that
+boast was a true one.)
+
+King glanced to his left and saw that there was no risk of being
+overheard or interrupted by Ismail; the Afridi was beating his fists
+together, rocking from side to side in frenzy, and letting out about one
+yell a minute that would have curdled a wolf's heart.
+
+"Nay, I have all I need!" he answered, and the Pathan laughed.
+
+"In thine own time, hakim! Need forgets none of us!"
+
+"True!" said King.
+
+He nodded more to himself than to the other man. He needed, for
+instance, very much to know who was planning a jihad, and who
+"Bull-with-a-beard" might be; but it was not safe to confide just yet in
+a chance-made acquaintance. A very fair acquaintance with some phases of
+the East had taught him that names such as Bull-with-a-beard are often
+almost photographically descriptive. He rose to his feet to look. A
+blind man can talk, but it takes trained eyes to gather information.
+
+The din had increased, and it was safe to stand up and stare, because
+all eyes were on the madness in the middle. There were plenty besides
+himself who stood to get a better view, and he had to dodge from side to
+side to see between them.
+
+"I'm not to doctor his men. Therefore it's a fair guess that he and
+I are to be kept apart. Therefore he'll be as far away from me now as
+possible, supposing he's here."
+
+Reasoning along that line, he tried to see the face on the far side, but
+the problem was to see over the dancers' heads. He succeeded presently,
+for the Orakzai Pathan saw what he wanted, and in his anxiety to be
+agreeable, reached forward to pull back a box from between the ranks in
+front.
+
+Its owners offered instant fight, but made no further objection when
+they saw who wanted it and why. King wondered at their sudden change of
+mind, the Pathan looked actually grieved that a fight should have been
+spared him. He tried, with a few barbed insults, to rearouse a spark of
+enmity, but failed, to his own great discontent.
+
+The box was a commonplace affair, built square, of pine, and had
+probably contained somebody's new helmet at one stage of its career. The
+stenciled marks on its sides and top had long ago become obliterated by
+wear and dirt.
+
+King got up on it and gazed long at the rows of spectators on the far
+side, and having no least notion what to look for, he studied the faces
+one by one.
+
+"If he's important enough for her to have it in for him, he'll not be
+far from the front," he reasoned and with that in mind he picked out
+several bull-necked, bearded men, any one of whom could easily have
+answered to the description. There were too many of them to give him any
+comfort, until the thought occurred to him that a man with brains enough
+to be a leader would not be so obsessed and excited by mere prancing
+athleticism as those men were. Then he looked farther along the line.
+
+He found a man soon who was not interested in the dancing, but who had
+eyes and ears apparently for everything and everybody else. He watched
+him for ten minutes, until at last their eyes met. Then he sat down and
+kicked the box back to its owners.
+
+He looked again at Ismail. With teeth clenched and eyes ablaze, the
+Afridi was smashing his knuckles together and rocking to and fro.
+There was no need to fear him. He turned and touched the Pathan's broad
+shoulder. The man smiled and bent his turbaned head to listen.
+
+"Opposite," said King, "nearly exactly opposite--three rows back from
+the front, counting the front row as one--there sits a man with his arm
+in a sling and a bandage over his eye."
+
+The Pathan nodded and touched his knife-hilt.
+
+"One-and-twenty men from him, counting him as one, sits a man with a big
+black beard, whose shoulders are like a bull's. As he sits he hangs his
+head between them--thus."
+
+"And you want him killed? Nay, I think you mean Muhammad Anim. His time
+is not yet."
+
+The suggestion was as good-naturedly prompt as if the hakim's need had
+been water, and the other's flask were empty. He was sorry he could not
+offer to oblige.
+
+"Who am I that I should want him killed?" King answered with mild
+reproof. "My trade is to heal, not slay. I am a hakim."
+
+The other nodded.
+
+"Yet, to enter Khinjan Caves you had to slay a man, hakim or no!"
+
+"He was an unbeliever," King answered modestly, and the other nodded
+again with friendly understanding.
+
+"What about the man yonder, then?" the Pathan asked. "What will you have
+of him?"
+
+"Look! See! Tell me truly what his name is!"
+
+The Pathan got up and strode forward to stand on the box, kicking aside
+the elbows that leaned on it and laughing when the owners cursed him.
+He stood on it and stared for five minutes, counting deliberately three
+times over, striking a finger on the palm of his hand to check himself.
+
+"Bull-with-a-beard!" he announced at last, dropping back into place
+beside King. "Muhammad Anim. The mullah Muhammad Anim."
+
+"An Afghan?" King asked.
+
+"He says he is an Afghan. But unless he lies he is from Isbtamboul
+(Constantinople)."
+
+Itching to ask more questions, King sat still and held his peace. The
+direr the need of information in the "Hills," and in all the East
+for that matter, the greater the wisdom, as a rule, of seeming
+uninquisitive. And wisdom was rewarded now, for the Pathan, who would
+have dried up under eager questioning, grew talkative. Civility and
+volubility are sometimes one, and not always only among the civilized.
+King--the hakim Kurram Khan--blinked mildly behind his spectacles and
+looked like one to whom a savage might safely ease his mind.
+
+"He bade me go to Sikaram where my village is and bring him a hundred
+men for his lashkar. He says he has her special favor. Wait and watch, I
+say!
+
+"Has he money?" asked King, apparently drawing a bow at a venture for
+conversation's sake. But there is an art in asking artless questions.
+
+"Aye! The liar says the Germans gave it to him! He swears they will send
+more. Who are the Germans? Who is a man who talks of a jihad that is
+to be, that he should have gold coin given him by unbelievers? I saw a
+German once, at Nuklao. He ate pig-meat and washed it down with wine.
+Are such men sons of the Prophet? Wait and watch, say I!"
+
+"Money?" said King. "He admits it? And none dare kill him for it? You
+say his time is not yet come?"
+
+More than ever it was obvious that the hakim was a very simple man. The
+Pathan made a gesture of contempt.
+
+"I dare what I will, hakim! But he says there is more money on the way!
+When he has it all--why--we are all in Allah's keeping--He decides!"
+
+"And should no more money come?"
+
+This was courteous conversation and received as such--many a long league
+removed from curiosity.
+
+"Who am I to foretell a man's kismet? I know what I know, and I think
+what I think! I know thee, hakim, for a gentle fellow, who hurt me
+almost not at all in the drawing of a bullet out of my flesh. What
+knowest thou about me?"
+
+"That I will dress the wound for thee again!"
+
+Artless statements are as useful in their way as artless questions. Let
+the guile lie deep, that is all.
+
+"Nay, nay! For she said nay! Shall I fall foul of her, for the sake of a
+new bandage?"
+
+The temptation was terrific to ask why she had given that order, but
+King resisted it; and presently it occurred to the Pathan that his own
+theories on the subject might be of interest.
+
+"She will use thee for a reward," he said. "He who shall win and keep
+her favor may have his hurts dressed and his belly dosed. Her enemies
+may rot."
+
+"Who is fool enough to be her enemy?" asked King, the altogether mild
+and guileless.
+
+The Pathan stuck out his tongue and squeezed his nose with one finger
+until it nearly disappeared into his face.
+
+"If she calls a man enemy, how shall he prove otherwise?" he answered.
+Then he rolled off center, to pull out his great snuff-box from the
+leather bag at his waist.
+
+"Does she call the mullah Muhammad Anim enemy?" King asked him.
+
+"Nay, she never mentions him by name."
+
+"Art thou a man of thy word?" King asked.
+
+"When it suits me."
+
+"There was a promise regarding my reward."
+
+"Name it, hakim! We will see."
+
+"Go tell the mullah Muhammad Anim where I sit!"
+
+The fellow laughed. He considered himself tricked; one could read that
+plainly enough; for taking polite messages does not come within the
+Hills' elastic code of izzat, although carrying a challenge is another
+matter. Yet he felt grateful for the hakim's service and was ready to
+seize the first cheap means of squaring the indebtedness.
+
+"Keep my place!" he ordered, getting up. He growled it, as some men
+speak to dogs, because growling soothed his ruffled vanity.
+
+He helped himself noisily to snuff then and began to clear a passage,
+kicking out to right and left and laughing when his victims protested.
+Before he had traversed fifty yards he had made himself more enemies
+than most men dare aspire to in a lifetime, and he seemed well pleased
+with the fruit of his effort.
+
+The dance went on for fifteen minutes yet, but then--quite
+unexpectedly--all the arena guards together fired a volley at the roof,
+and the dance stopped as if every dancer had been hit. The spectators
+were set surging by the showers of stone splinters, that hurt whom they
+struck, and their snarl was like a wolf-pack's when a tiger interferes.
+But the guards thought it all a prodigious joke and the more the crowd
+swore the more they laughed.
+
+Panting--foaming at the mouth, some of them--the dancers ran to their
+seats and set the crowd surging again, leaving the arena empty of all
+but the guards. The man whose seat Ismail had taken came staggering,
+slippery with sweat, and squeezed himself where he belonged, forcing
+King into the Pathan's empty place. Ismail threw his arms round the man
+and patted him, calling him "mighty dancer," "son of the wind," "prince
+of prancers," "prince of swordsmen," "war-horse," and a dozen more
+endearing epithets. The fellow lay back across Ismail's knees,
+breathless but well enough contented.
+
+And after a few more minutes the Orakzai Pathan came back, and King
+tried to make room for him to sit.
+
+"I bade thee keep my place!" he growled, towering over King and plucking
+at his knife-belt irresolutely. He made it clear without troubling to
+use words that any other man would have had to fight, and the hakim
+might think himself lucky.
+
+"Take my seat," said King, struggling to get up.
+
+"Nay, nay--sit still, thou. I can kick room for myself. So! So! So!"
+
+There was an answering snarl of hate that seemed like a song to him,
+amid which he sat down.
+
+"The mullah Muhammad Anim answered he knows nothing of thee and cares
+less! He said--and he said it with vehemence--it is no more to him where
+a hakim sits than where the rats hide!"
+
+He watched King's face and seeing that, King allowed his facial muscles
+to express chagrin.
+
+"Between us, it is a poor time for messages to him. He is too full of
+pride that his lashkar should have beaten the British."
+
+"Did they beat the British greatly?" King asked him, with only vague
+interest on his face and a prayer inside him that his heart might
+flutter less violently against his ribs. His voice was as non-committal
+as the mullah's message.
+
+"Who knows, when so many men would rather lie than kill? Each one who
+returned swears he slew a hundred. But some did not return. Wait and
+watch, say I!"
+
+Now a man stood up near the edge of the crowd whom King recognized;
+and recognition brought no joy with it. The mullah without hair or
+eyelashes, who had admitted him and his party through the mosque into
+the Caves, strode out to the middle of the arena all alone, strutting
+and swaggering. He recalled the man's last words and drew no consolation
+from them, either.
+
+"Many have entered! Some went out by a different road!"
+
+Cold chills went down his back. All at once Ismail's manner became
+unencouraging. He ceased to make a fuss over the dancer and began to eye
+King sidewise, until at last he seemed unable to contain the malice that
+would well forth.
+
+"At the gate there were only words!" he whispered. "Here in this cavern
+men wait for proof!"
+
+He licked his teeth suggestively, as a wolf does when he contemplates
+a meal. Then, as an afterthought, as though ashamed, "I love thee! Thou
+art a man after my own heart! But I am her man! Wait and see!"
+
+The mullah in the arena, blinking with his lashless eyes, held both
+arms up for silence in the attitude of a Christian priest blessing
+a congregation. The guards backed his silent demand with threatening
+rifles. The din died to a hiss of a thousand whispers, and then the
+great cavern grew still, and only the river could be heard sucking
+hungrily between the smooth stone banks.
+
+"God is great!" the mullah howled.
+
+"God is great!" the crowd thundered in echo to him; and then the vault
+took up the echoes. "God is great--is great--is great--ea--ea--eat!"
+
+"And Muhammad is His prophet!" howled the mullah. Instantly they
+answered him again.
+
+"And Muhammad is His prophet!"
+
+"His prophet--is His prophet--is His prophet!" said the stalactites, in
+loud barks--then in murmurs--then in awe-struck whispers.
+
+That seemed to be all the religious ritual Khinjan remembered or could
+tolerate. Considering that the mullah, too, must have killed his man
+in cold blood before earning the right to be there, perhaps it was
+enough--too much. There were men not far from King who shuddered.
+
+"There are strangers!" announced the mullah, as a man might say, "I
+smell a rat!" But he did not look at anybody in particular; he blinked
+at the crowd.
+
+"Strangers!" said the stalactites, in an awe-struck whisper.
+
+"Show them! Show them! Let them stand forth!"
+
+"Oh-h-h-h-h! Let them stand forth!" said the roof.
+
+The mullah bowed as if that idea were a new one and he thought it better
+than his own; for all crowds love flattery.
+
+"Bring them!" he shouted, and King suppressed a shudder--for what proof
+had he of right to be there beyond Ismail's verbal corroboration of a
+lie? Would Ismail lie for him again? he wondered. And if so, would the
+lie be any use?
+
+Not far from where King sat there was an immediate disturbance in the
+crowd, and a wretched-looking Baluchi was thrust forward at a run, with
+arms lashed to his sides and a pitiful look of terror on his face. Two
+more Baluchis were hustled along after him, protesting a little, but
+looking almost as hopeless.
+
+Once in the arena, the guards took charge of all three of them and lined
+them up facing the mullah, clubbing them with their rifle-butts to
+get quick obedience. The crowd began to be noisy again, but the mullah
+signed for silence.
+
+"These are traitors!" he howled, with a gesture such as Ajax might have
+used when he defied the lightning.
+
+The roof said "Traitors!"
+
+"Slay them, then!" howled the crowd, delighted. And blinking behind the
+horn-rimmed spectacles, King began to look about busily for hope, where
+there did not seem to be any.
+
+"Nay, hear me first!" the mullah howled, and his voice was like a wolf's
+at hunting time. "Hear, and be warned!"
+
+The crowd grew very still, but King saw that some men licked their lips,
+as if they well knew what was coming.
+
+"These three men came, and one was a new man!" the mullah howled. "The
+other two were his witnesses! All three swore that the first man came
+from slaying an unbeliever in the teeth of written law. They said he ran
+from the law. So, as the custom is, I let all three enter!"
+
+"Good!" said the crowd. "Good!" They might have been five thousand
+judges, judging in equity, so grave they were. Yet they licked their
+lips.
+
+"But later, word came to me saying they are liars. So--again as the
+custom is--I ordered them bound and held!"
+
+"Slay them! Slay them!" the crowd yelped, gleeful as a wolf-pack on a
+scent and abandoning solemnity as suddenly as it had been assumed. "Slay
+them!"
+
+They were like the wind, whipping in and out among Khinjan's rocks,
+savage and then still for a minute, savage and then still.
+
+"Nay, there is a custom yet!" the mullah howled, holding up both arms.
+And there was silence again like the lull before a hurricane, with only
+the great black river talking to itself.
+
+"Who speaks for them? Does any speak for them?"
+
+"Speak for them?" said the roof.
+
+There was silence. Then there was a murmur of astonishment. Over
+opposite to where King sat the mullah stood up, who the Pathan had said
+was "Bull-with-a-beard"--Muhammad Anim.
+
+"The men are mine!" he growled. His voice was like a bear's at bay; it
+was low, but it carried strangely. And as he spoke he swung his great
+head between his shoulders, like a bear that means to charge. "The proof
+they brought has been stolen! They had good proof! I speak for them! The
+men are mine!"
+
+The Pathan nudged King in the ribs with an elbow like a club and tickled
+his ear with hot breath.
+
+"Bull-with-a-beard speaks truth!" he grinned. "'Truth and a lie
+together! Good may it do him and them! They die, they three Baluchis!"
+
+"Proof!" howled the mullah who had no hair eyelashes.
+
+"Proof--oof--oof!" said the stalactites.
+
+"Proof! Show us proof!" yelled the crowd.
+
+"Words at the gate--proof in the cavern!" howled the lashless one.
+
+The Pathan next King leaned over to whisper to him again, but stiffened
+in the act. There was a great gasp the same instant, as the whole crowd
+caught its breath all together. The mullah in the middle froze into
+mobility. Bull-with-a-beard stood mumbling, swaying his great head from
+side to side, no longer suggestive of a bear about to charge, but of one
+who hesitates.
+
+The crowd was staring at the end of the bridge. King stared, too, and
+caught his own breath. For Yasmini stood there, smiling on them all as
+the new moon smiles down on the Khyber! She had come among them like a
+spirit, all unheralded.
+
+So much more beautiful than the one likeness King had seen of her that
+for a second he doubted who she was--more lovely than he had imagined
+her even in his dreams--she stood there, human and warm and real, who
+had begun to seem a myth, clad in gauzy transparent stuff that made no
+secret of sylph-like shapeliness and looking nearly light enough to blow
+away. Her feet--and they were the most marvelously molded things he had
+ever seen--were naked and played restlessly on the naked stone. Not one
+part of her was still for a fraction of a second; yet the whole effect
+was of insolently lazy ease.
+
+Her eyes blazed brighter than the little jewels stitched to her gossamer
+dress, and when a man once looked at them he did not find it easy to
+look away again. Even mullah Muhammad Anim seemed transfixed, like a
+great foolish animal.
+
+But King was staring very hard indeed at something else--mentally
+cursing the plain glass spectacles he wore, that had begun to film over
+and dim his vision. There were two bracelets on her arm, both barbaric
+things of solid gold. The smaller of the two was on her wrist and the
+larger on her upper arm, but they were so alike, except for size, and so
+exactly like the one Rewa Gunga had given him in her name and that had
+been stolen from him in the night, that he ran the risk of removing the
+glasses a moment to stare with unimpeded eyes. Even then the distance
+was too great. He could not quite see.
+
+But her eyes began to search the crowd in his direction, and then he
+knew two things absolutely. He was sitting where she had ordered Ismail
+to place him; for she picked him out almost instantly, and laughed as
+if somebody had struck a silver bell. And one of those bracelets was the
+one that he had worn; for she flaunted it at him, moving her arm so that
+the light should make the gold glitter.
+
+Then, perhaps because the crowd bad begun to whisper, and she wanted all
+attention, she raised both arms to toss back the golden hair that came
+cascading nearly to her knees. And as if the crowd knew that symptom
+well, it drew its breath in sharply and grew very still.
+
+"Muhammad Anim!" she said, and she might have been wooing him. "That was
+a devil's trick!"
+
+It was rather an astounding statement, coming from lovely lips in such
+a setting. It was rather suggestive of a driver's whiplash, flicked
+through the air for a beginning. Muhammad Anim continued glaring and did
+not answer her, so in her own good time, when she had tossed her golden
+hair back once or twice again, she developed her meaning.
+
+"We who are free of Khinjan Caves do not send men out to bring recruits.
+We know better than to bid our men tell lies for others at the gate.
+Nor, seeking proof for our new recruit, do we send men to hunt a head
+for him--not even those of us who have a lashkar that we call our own,
+mullah Muhammad Anim. Each of us earns his own way in!"
+
+The mullah Muhammad Anim began to stroke his beard, but he made no
+answer.
+
+"And--mullah Muhammad Anim, thou wandering man of God--when that lashkar
+has foolishly been sent and has failed, is it written in the Kalamullah
+saying we should pretend there was a head, and that the head was stolen?
+A lie is a lie, Muhammad Anim! Wandering perhaps is good, if in search
+of the way. Is it good to lose the way, and to lie, thou true follower
+of the Prophet?"
+
+She smiled, tossing her hair back. Her eyes challenged, her lips mocked
+him and her chin scorned. The crowd breathed hard and watched. The
+mullah muttered something in his beard, and sat down, and the crowd
+began to roar applause at her. But she checked it with a regal gesture,
+and a glance of contempt at the mullah that was alone worth a journey
+across the "Hills" to see.
+
+"Guards!" she said quietly. And the crowd's sigh then was like the night
+wind in a forest.
+
+"Away with those three of Muhammad Anim's men!"
+
+Twelve of the arena guards threw down their shields with a sudden
+clatter and seized the prisoners, four to each. The crowd shivered with
+delicious anticipation. The doomed men neither struggled nor cried,
+for fatalism is an anodyne as well as an explosive. King set his teeth.
+Yasmini, with both hands behind her head, continued to smile down on
+them all as sweetly as the stars shine on a battle-field.
+
+She nodded once; and then all was over in a minute. With a ringing "Ho!"
+and a run, the guards lifted their victims shoulder high and bore them
+forward. At the river bank they paused for a second to swing them. Then,
+with another "Ho!" they threw them like dead rubbish into the swift
+black water.
+
+There was only one wild scream that went echoing and re-echoing to the
+roof. There was scarcely a splash, and no extra ripple at all. No heads
+came up again to gasp. No fingers clutched at the surface. The fearful
+speed of the river sucked them under, to grind and churn and pound them
+through long caverns underground and hurl them at last over the great
+cataract toward the middle of the world.
+
+"Ah-h-h-h-h!" sighed the crowd in ecstasy.
+
+"Is there no other stranger?" asked Yasmini, searching for King again
+with her amazing eyes. The skin all down his back turned there and then
+into gooseflesh. And as her eyes met his she laughed like a bell at him.
+She knew! She knew who he was, how he had entered, and how he felt. Not
+a doubt of it!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XI
+
+
+     Long slept the Heart o' the Hills, oh, long!
+     (Ye who have watched, ye know!)
+     As sap sleeps in the deodars
+     When winter shrieks and steely stars
+     Blink over frozen snow.
+     Ye haste? The sap stirs now, ye say?
+     Ye feel the pulse of spring?
+     But sap must rise ere buds may break,
+     Or cubs fare forth, or bees awake,
+     Or lean buck spurn the ling!
+
+
+"Kurram Khan!" the lashless mullah howled, like a lone wolf in the
+moonlight, and King stood up.
+
+It is one of the laws of Cocker, who wrote the S. S. Code, that a man
+is alive until he is proved dead, and where there is life there is
+opportunity. In that grim minute King felt heretical; but a man's
+feelings are his own affair provided he can prove it, and he managed to
+seem about as much at ease as a native hakim ought to feel at such an
+initiation.
+
+"Come forward!" the mullah howled, and he obeyed, treading gingerly
+between men who were at no pains to let him by, and silently blessing
+them, because he was not really in any hurry at all. Yasmini looked
+lovely from a distance, and life was sweet.
+
+"Who are his witnesses?"
+
+"Witnesses?" the roof hissed.
+
+"I!" shouted Ismail, jumping up.
+
+"I!" cracked the roof. "I! I!" So that for a second King almost believed
+he had a crowd of men to swear for him and did not hear Darya Khan at
+all, who rose from a place not very far behind where had sat.
+
+Ismail followed him in a hurry, like a man wading a river with loose
+clothes gathered in one arm and the other arm ready in case of falling.
+He took much less trouble than King not to tread on people, and oaths'
+marked his wake.
+
+Darya Khan did not go so fast. As he forced his way forward a man passed
+him up the wooden box that King had used to stand on; he seized it in
+both hands with a grin and a jest and went to stand behind King and
+Ismail, in line with the lashless mullah, facing Yasmini. Yasmini smiled
+at them all as if they were actors in her comedy, and she well pleased
+with them.
+
+"Look ye!" howled the mullah. "Look ye and look well, for this is to be
+one of us!"
+
+King felt ten thousand eyes burn holes in his back, but the one pair of
+eyes that mocked him from the bridge was more disconcerting.
+
+"Turn, Kurram Khan! Turn that all may see!"
+
+Feeling like a man on a spit, he revolved slowly. By the time he had
+turned once completely around, besides knowing positively that one of
+the two bracelets on her right arm was the one he had worn, or else its
+exact copy, he knew that he was not meant to die yet; for his eyes could
+work much more swiftly than the horn-rimmed spectacles made believe. He
+decided that Yasmini meant he should be frightened, but not much hurt
+just yet.
+
+So he ceased altogether to feel frightened and took care to look more
+scared than ever.
+
+"Who paid the price of thy admission?" the mullah howled, and King
+cleared his throat, for he was not quite sure yet what that might mean.
+
+"Speak, Kurram Khan!" Yasmini purred, smiling her loveliest. "Tell them
+whom you slew."
+
+King turned and faced the crowd, raising himself on the balls of his
+feet to shout, like a man facing thousands of troops on parade. He
+nearly gave himself away, for habit had him unawares. A native hakim,
+given the stoutest lungs in all India, would not have shouted in that
+way.
+
+"Cappitin Attleystan King!" he roared. And he nearly jumped out of
+his skin when his own voice came rattling back at him from the roof
+overhead.
+
+"Cappitin Attleystan King!" it answered.
+
+Yasmini chuckled as a little rill will sometimes chuckle among ferns. It
+was devilish. It seemed to say there were traps not far ahead.
+
+"Where was he slain?" asked the mullah.
+
+"In the Khyber Pass," said King.
+
+"In the Khyber Pass!" the roof whispered hoarsely, as if aghast at such
+cold-bloodedness.
+
+"Now give proof!" said the mullah. "Words at the gate--proof in the
+cavern! Without good proof, there is only one way out of here!"
+
+"Proof!" the crowd thundered. "Proof!"
+
+"Proof! Proof! Proof!" the roof echoed.
+
+There was no need for Darya Khan to whisper. King's hands were behind
+him, and he had seen what he had seen and guessed what he had guessed
+while he was turning to let the crowd look at him. His fingers closed on
+human hair.
+
+"Nay, it is short!" hissed Darya Khan. "Take the two ears, or hold it by
+the jawbone! Hold it high in both hands!"
+
+King obeyed, without looking at the thing, and Ismail, turning to face
+the crowd, rose on tiptoe and filled his lungs for the effort of his
+life.
+
+"The head of Cappitin Attleystan King--infidel kaffir--British
+arrficer!" he howled.
+
+"Good!" the crowd bellowed. "Good! Throw it!"
+
+The crowd's roar and the roof's echoes combined until pandemonium.
+
+"Throw it to them, Kurram Khan!" Yasmini purred from the bridge end,
+speaking as softly and as sweetly, as if she coaxed a child. Yet her
+voice carried.
+
+He lowered the head, but instead of looking at it he looked up at her.
+He thought she was enjoying herself and his predicament as he had never
+seen any one enjoy anything.
+
+"Throw it to them, Kurram Khan!" she purred. "It is the custom!"
+
+"Throw it! Throw it!" the crowd thundered.
+
+He turned the ghastly thing until it lay face-upward in his hands, and
+so at last he saw it. He caught his breath, and only the horn-rimmed
+spectacles, that he had cursed twice that night, saved him from
+self-betrayal. The cavern seemed to sway, but he recovered and his wits
+worked swiftly. If Yasmini detected his nervousness she gave no sign.
+
+"Throw it! Throw it! Throw it!"
+
+The crowd was growing impatient. Many men were standing, waving their
+arms to draw attention to themselves, and he wondered what the ultimate
+end of the head would be, if he obeyed and threw it to them. Watching
+Yasmini's eyes, he knew it had not entered her head that he might
+disobey.
+
+He looked past her toward the river. There were no guards near enough to
+prevent what he intended; but he had to bear in mind that the guards
+had rifles, and if he acted too suddenly one of them might shoot at him
+unbidden. They were wondrous free with their cartridges, those guards,
+in a land where ammunition is worth its weight in silver coin.
+
+Holding the head before him with both hands, he began to walk toward the
+river, edging all the while a little toward the crowd as if meaning to
+get nearer before he threw.
+
+He was much more than half-way to the river's edge before Yasmini or
+anybody else divined his true intention. The mullah grew suspicions
+first and yelled. Then King hurried, for he did not believe Yasmini
+would need many seconds in which to regain command of any situation. But
+she saw fit to stand still and watch.
+
+He reached the river and stood there. Now he was in no hurry at all, for
+it stood to reason that unless Yasmini very much desired him to be kept
+alive he would have been shot dead already. For a moment the crowd was
+so interested that it forgot to bark and snarl.
+
+His next move was as deliberate as he could make it, although he was
+careful to avoid the least suggestion of mummery (for then the crowd
+would have suspected disloyalty to Islam, and the "Hills" are very, very
+pious, and very suspicious of all foreign ritual).
+
+He did a thoughtful simple thing that made every savage who watched him
+gasp because of its very unexpectedness. He held the head in both
+hands, threw it far out into the river and stood to watch it sink. Then,
+without visible emotion of any kind, he walked back stolidly to face
+Yasmini at the bridge end, with shoulders a little more stubborn now
+than they ought to be, and chin a shade too high, for there never was a
+man who could act quite perfectly.
+
+"Thou fool!" Yasmini whispered through lips that did not move.
+
+She betrayed a flash of temper like a trapped she-tiger's, but followed
+it instantly with her loveliest smile. Like to like, however, the crowd
+saw the flash of temper and took its cue from that.
+
+"Slay him!" yelled a lone voice, that was greeted an approving murmur.
+
+"Slay him!" advised the roof in a whisper, in one of its phonetic
+tricks.
+
+"This is a darbar!" Yasmini announced in a rising, ringing voice. "My
+darbar, for I summoned it! Did I invite any man to speak?"
+
+There was silence, as a whipped unwilling pack is silent.
+
+"Speak, thou, Kurram Khan!" she said. "Knowing the custom--having heard
+the order to throw that trophy to them--why act otherwise? Explain!"
+
+Nothing in the wide world could be fairer! She left him to extricate
+himself from a mess of his own making! It was more than fair, for she
+went out of her way to offer him an opening to jump through. And she
+paid him the compliment of suggesting be must be clever enough to take
+it, for she seemed to expect a satisfying answer.
+
+"Tell them why!" she said, smiling. No man could have guessed by the
+tone of her voice whether she was for him or against him, and the crowd,
+beginning again to whisper, watched to see which way the cat would jump.
+
+He bowed low to her three times--very low indeed and very slowly, for he
+had to think. Then he turned his back and repeated the obeisance to the
+crowd. Still he could think of no excuse, except Cocker's Rule No. I for
+Tight Places, and all the world knows that because Solomon said much the
+same thing first:
+
+"A soft answer is better than a sword!"
+
+But Cocker adds, "Never excuse. Explain! And blame no man."
+
+"My brothers," he said, and paused, since a man must make a beginning,
+even when he can not see the end. And as he spoke the answer came to
+him. He stood upright, and his voice became that of a man whose advice
+has been asked, and who gives it freely. "These be stirring times! Ye
+need take care, my brothers! Ye saw this night how one man entered here
+on the strength of an oath and a promise. All he lacked was proof. And I
+had proof. Ye saw! Who am I that I should deny you a custom? Yet--think
+ye, my brothers!--how easy would it not have been, had I thrown that
+head to you, for a traitor to catch it and hide it in his clothes,
+and make away with it! He could have used it to admit to these
+caves--why--even an Englishman, my brothers! If that had happened, ye
+would have blamed me!"
+
+Yasmini smiled. Taking its cue from her, the crowd murmured, scarcely
+assent, but rather recognition of the hakim's adroitness. The game
+was not won; there lacked a touch to tip the scales in his favor, and
+Yasmini supplied it with ready genius.
+
+"The hakim speaks truth!" she laughed.
+
+King turned about instantly to face her, but he salaamed so low that she
+could not have seen his expression had she tried.
+
+"If Ye wish it, I will order him tossed into Earth's Drink after those
+other three."
+
+Muhammed Anim rose stroking his beard and rocking where he stood.
+
+"It is the law!" he growled, and King shuddered.
+
+"It is the law," Yasmini answered in a voice that rang with pride and
+insolence, "that none interrupt me while I speak! For such ill-mannered
+ones Earth's Drink hungers! Will you test my authority, Muhammad Anim?"
+
+The mullah sat down, and hundreds of men laughed at him, but not all of
+the men by any means.
+
+"It is the law that none goes out of Khinjan Cave alive who breaks the
+law of the Caves. But he broke no very big law. And he spoke truth.
+Think Ye! If that head had only fallen into Muhammad Anim's lap, the
+mullah might have smuggled in another man with it!"
+
+A roar of laughter greeted that thrust. Many men who had not laughed at
+the mullah's first discomfiture, joined in now. Muhammad Anim sat and
+fidgeted, meeting nobody's eye and answering nothing.
+
+"So it seems to me good," Yasmini said, in a voice that did not echo any
+more but rang very clear and true (she seemed to know the trick of the
+roof, and to use the echo or not as she chose), "to let this hakim live!
+He shall meditate in his cave a while, and perhaps he shall be beaten,
+lest he dare offend again. He can no more escape from Khinjan Caves than
+the women who are prisoners here. He may therefore live!"
+
+There was utter silence. Men looked at one another and at her, and her
+blazing eyes searched the crowd swiftly. It was plain enough that there
+were at least two parties there, and that none dared oppose Yasmini's
+will for fear of the others.
+
+"To thy seat, Kurram Khan!" she ordered, when she had waited a full
+minute and no man spoke.
+
+He wasted no time. He hurried out of the arena as fast as he could walk,
+with Ismail and Darya Khan close at his heels. It was like a run out of
+danger in a dream. He stumbled over the legs of the front-rank men in
+his hurry to get back to his place, and Ismail overtook him, seized him
+by the shoulders, hugged him, and dragged him to the empty seat next to
+the Orakzai Pathan. There he hugged him until his ribs cracked.
+
+"Ready o' wit!" he crowed. "Ready o' tongue! Light o' life! Man after
+mine own heart! Hey, I love thee! Readily I would be thy man, but for
+being hers! Would I had a son like thee! Fool--fool--fool not to throw
+the head to them! Squeamish one! Man like a child! What is the head
+but earth when the life has left it? What would thy head be without the
+nimble wit? Fool--fool--fool! And clever! Turned the joke on Muhammad
+Anim! Turned it on Bull-with-a-beard in a twinkling--in the bat of an
+eye--in a breath! Turned it against her enemy and raised a laugh against
+him from his own men! Ready o' wit! Shameless one! Lucky one! Allah was
+surely good to thee!"
+
+Still exulting, he let go, but none too soon for comfort. King's ribs
+were sore from his hugging for days.
+
+"What is it?" he asked. For King seemed to be shaping words with his
+lips. He bent a great hairy ear to listen.
+
+"Have they taken Ali Masjid Fort?" King whispered.
+
+"How should I know? Why?"
+
+"Tell me, man, if you love me! Have they taken it?"
+
+"Nay, how should I know? Ask her! She knows more than any man knows!"
+
+King turned to ask the same question of his friend the Orakzai Pathan;
+but the Pathan would have none of his questions, he was busy listening
+for whispers from the crowd, watching with both eyes, and he shoved King
+aside.
+
+The crowd was very far from being satisfied. An angry murmur had begun
+to fill the cavern as a hive is filled with the song of bees at swarming
+time. But even so, surmise what one might, it was not easy to persuade
+the eye that Yasmini's careless smile and easy poise were assumed.
+If she recognized indignation and feared it, she disguised her fear
+amazingly.
+
+King saw her whisper to a guard. The fellow nodded and passed his shield
+to another man. He began to make his way in no great hurry toward the
+edge of the arena. She whispered again and standing forward with their
+trumpets seven of the guards blew a blast that split across the cavern
+like the trump of doom; and as its hundred thousand echoes died in the
+roof, the hum of voices died, too, and the very sound of breathing. The
+gurgling of water became as if the river flowed in solitude.
+
+Leisurely then, languidly, she raised both arms until she looked like an
+angel poised for flight. The little jewels stitched to her gauzy dress
+twinkled like fire-flies as she moved. The crowd gasped sharply. She had
+it by the heart-strings.
+
+She called, and four guards got under one shield, bowing their heads and
+resting the great rim on their shoulders. They carried it beneath her
+and stood still. With a low delicious laugh, sweet and true, she sprang
+on it, and the shield scarcely trembled; she seemed lighter than the
+silk her dress was woven from!
+
+They carried her so, looking as if she and the shield were carved of a
+piece, and by a master such as has not often been. And in the midst of
+the arena before they had ceased moving she began to sing, with her head
+thrown back and bosom swelling like a bird's.
+
+The East would ever rather draw its own conclusions from a hint let fall
+than be puzzled by what the West believes are facts. And parables are
+not good evidence in courts of law, which is always a consideration. So
+her song took the form of a parable.
+
+And to say that she took hold of them and played rhapsodies of her own
+making on their heart-strings would be to undervalue what she did. They
+were dumb while she sang, but they rose at her. Not a force in the
+world could have kept them down, for she was deftly touching cords that
+stirred other forces--subtle, mysterious, mesmeric, which the old East
+understands--which Muhammad the Prophet understood when he harnessed
+evil in the shafts with men and wrote rules for their driving in a book.
+They rose in silence and stood tense.
+
+While she sang, the guard to whom she had whispered forced a way through
+the ranks of the standing crowd, and came behind Ismail. He tweaked
+the Afridi's ear to draw attention, for like all the others--like King,
+too--Ismail was listening with dropped jaw and watching with burning
+eyes. For a minute they whispered, so low that King did not hear what
+they said; and then the guard forced his way back by the shortest route
+to the arena, knocking down half a dozen men and gaining safety beyond
+the lamps before his victims could draw knife and follow him.
+
+Yasmini's song went on, verse after verse, telling never one fact, yet
+hinting unutterable things in a language that was made for hint and
+metaphor and parable and innuendo. What tongue did not hint at was
+conveyed by subtle gesture and a smile and flashing eyes. It was
+perfectly evident that she knew more than King--more than the general at
+Peshawur--more than the viceroy at Simla--probably more than the British
+government--concerning what was about to happen in Islam. The others
+might guess. She knew. It was just as evident that she would not tell.
+The whole of her song, and it took her twenty minutes by the count of
+King's pulse, to sing it, was a warning to wait and a promise of amazing
+things to come.
+
+She sang of a wolf-pack gathering from the valleys in the winter snow--a
+very hungry wolf-pack. Then of a stalled ox, grown very fat from being
+cared for. Of the "Heart of the Hills" that awoke in the womb of the
+"Hills," and that listened and watched.
+
+"Now, is she the 'Heart of the Hills'?" King wondered. The rumors men
+had heard and told again in India, about the "Heart of the Hills" in
+Khinjan seemed to have foundation.
+
+He thought of the strange knife, wrapped in a handkerchief under his
+shirt, with its bronze blade and gold hilt in the shape of a woman
+dancing. The woman dancing was astonishingly like Yasmini, standing on
+the shield!
+
+She sang about the owners of the stalled ox, who were busy at bay,
+defending themselves and their ox from another wolf-pack in another
+direction "far beyond."
+
+She urged them to wait a little while. The ox was big enough and fat
+enough to nourish all the wolves in the world for many seasons. Let
+them wait, then, until another, greater wolf-pack joined them, that they
+might go hunting all together, overwhelm its present owners and devour
+the ox! So urged the "Heart of the Hills," speaking to the mountain
+wolves, according to Yasmini's song.
+
+        "The little cubs in the burrows know.
+        Are ye grown wolves, who hurry so?"
+
+She paused, for effect; but they gave tongue then because they could not
+help it, and the cavern shook to their terrific worship.
+
+"Allah! Allah!"
+
+They summoned God to come and see the height and depth and weight of
+their allegiance to her! And because for their thunder there was no more
+chance of being heard, she dropped from the shield like a blossom. No
+sound of falling could have been heard in all that din, but one could
+see she made no sound. The shield-bearers ran back to the bridge and
+stood below it, eyes agape.
+
+Rewa Gunga spoke truth in Delhi when he assured King he should some day
+wonder at Yasmini's dancing.
+
+She became joy and bravery and youth! She danced a story for them of the
+things they knew. She was the dawn light, touching the distant peaks.
+She was the wind that follows it, sweeping among the junipers and
+kissing each as she came. She was laughter, as the little children
+laugh when the cattle are loosed from the byres at last to feed in the
+valleys. She was the scent of spring uprising. She was blossom. She was
+fruit! Very daughter of the sparkle of warm sun on snow, she was the
+"Heart of the Hills" herself!
+
+Never was such dancing! Never such an audience! Never such mad applause!
+She danced until the great rough guards had to run round the arena with
+clubbed butts and beat back trespassers who would have mobbed her. And
+every movement--every gracious wonder-curve and step with which she
+told her tale was as purely Greek as the handle on King's knife and the
+figures on the lamp-bowls and as the bracelets on her arm. Greek!
+
+And she half-modern-Russian, ex-girl-wife of a semi-civilized
+Hill-rajah! Who taught her? There is nothing new, even in Khinjan, in the
+"Hills"!
+
+And when the crowd defeated the arena guards at last and burst through
+the swinging butts to seize and fling her high and worship her with
+mad barbaric rite, she ran toward the shield. The four men raised it
+shoulder-high again. She went to it like a leaf in the wind--sprang on
+it as if wings had lifted her, scarce touching it with naked toes--and
+leapt to the bridge with a laugh.
+
+She went over the bridge on tiptoes, like nothing else under heaven but
+Yasmini at her bewitchingest. And without pausing on the far side she
+danced up the hewn stone stairs, dived into the dark hole and was gone!
+
+"Come!" yelled Ismail in King's ear. He could have heard nothing less,
+for the cavern was like to burst apart from the tumult.
+
+"Whither?" the Afridi shouted in disgust. "Does the wind ask whither?
+Come like the wind and see! They will remember next that they have a
+bone to pick with thee! Come away!"
+
+That seemed good enough advice. He followed as fast as Ismail could
+shoulder a way out between the frantic Hillmen, deafened, stupefied,
+numbed, almost cowed by the ovation they were giving their "Heart of
+their Hills."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XII
+
+
+
+     A scorpion in a corner stings himself to death.
+     A coward blames the gods. They laugh and let him die
+     A man goes forward
+     --Native Proverb
+
+
+As they disappeared after a scramble through the mouth of the same
+tunnel they had entered by, a roar went up behind them like the birth of
+earthquakes. Looking back over his shoulder, King saw Yasmini come back
+into the hole's mouth, to stand framed in it and bow acknowledgment.
+She looked so ravishing in contrast to the huge grim wall, and the black
+river, and the darkness at her back, that Khinjan's thousands tried to
+storm the bridge and drag her down to them. The guards were hard put to
+it, with their backs to the bridge end, for two or three minutes.
+
+But Ismail would not let him wait and watch from there. He dragged him
+down the tunnel and pushed him up on to a ledge where they could both
+see without being seen, through a fissure in the rock.
+
+For the space of five minutes Yasmini stood in the great hole, smiling
+and watching the struggle below. Then she went, and the guards began to
+get the best of it, because the crowd's enthusiasm waned when they could
+see her no more. Then suddenly the guards began to loose random volleys
+at the roof and brought down hundredweights of splintered stalactite.
+
+Within a minute there were a hundred men busy on sweeping up the
+splinters. In another minute twenty Zakka Khels had begun a sword dance,
+yelling like the damned. A hundred joined them. In three minutes more
+the whole arena was a dinning whirlpool, and the river's voice was
+drowned in shouting and the stamping of naked feet on stone.
+
+"Come!" urged Ismail, and led the way.
+
+King's last impression was of earth's womb on fire and of hellions
+brewing wrath. The stalactites and the hurrying river multiplied the
+dancing lights into a million, and the great roof hurled the din down
+again to make confusion with the new din coming up.
+
+Ismail went like a rat down a run, and King failed to overtake him until
+he found him in the cave of the slippers kicking to right and left at
+random.
+
+"Choose a good pair!" he growled. "Let late-comers fight for what is
+left! Nay, I have thine! Choose thou the next best!"
+
+The statement being one of fact, and that no time or place for a quarrel
+with the only friend in sight, King picked out the best slippers he
+could see. The instant he had them on Ismail was off again, running like
+the wind.
+
+They had no torch. They left the little tunnel lamps behind. It became
+so dark that King had to follow by ear, and so it happened that he
+missed seeing where the tunnel forked. He imagined they were running
+back toward the ledge under the waterfall; yet, when Ismail called a
+halt at last, panting, groped behind a great rock for a lamp and lit the
+wick with a common safety match, they were in a cave he had never seen
+before.
+
+"Where are we?" King asked.
+
+"Where none dare seek us."
+
+Ismail held the lamp high, shielding its wick with a hollowed palm and
+peering about him as if in doubt, his ragged beard looking like smoke in
+the wind; for a wind blew down all the passages in Khinjan.
+
+King examined the lamp. It was of bronze and almost as surely ancient
+Greek as it surely was not Indian. There were figures graven on the bowl
+representing a woman dancing, who looked not unlike Yasmini; but before
+he had time to look very closely Ismail blew the lamp out and was off
+again, like a shadow shot into its mother night.
+
+Confused by the sudden darkness King crashed into a rock as he tried to
+follow. Ismail turned back and gave him the end of a cotton girdle that
+he unwound from his waist; then he plunged ahead again into Cimmerian
+blackness, down a passage so narrow that they could touch a wall with
+either hand.
+
+Once he shouted back to duck, and they passed tinder a low roof where
+water dripped on them, and the rock underfoot was the bed of a shallow
+stream. After that the track began to rise, and the grade grew so steep
+that even Ismail, the furious, had to slacken pace.
+
+They began to climb up titanic stairways all in the dark, feeling their
+way through fissures in a mountain's framework, up zigzag ledges, and
+over great broken lumps of rock from one cave to another; until at last
+in one great cave Ismail stopped and relit the lamp. Hunting about with
+its aid he found an imported "hurricane" lantern and lit that, leaving
+the bronze lamp in its place.
+
+Soon after that they lost sight of walls to their left for a time,
+although there were no stars, nor any light to suggest the outer
+world--nothing but wind. The wind blew a hurricane.
+
+Their path now was a very narrow ledge formed by a crack that ran
+diagonally down the face of a black cliff on their right. They hugged
+the stone because of a sense of fathomless space above--below--on every
+side but one. The rock wall was the one thing tangible, and the footing
+the crack in it afforded was the gift of God.
+
+The moaning wind rose to a shriek at intervals and made their clothes
+flutter like ghosts' shrouds, and in spite of it King's shirt was
+drenched with sweat, and his fingers ached from clinging as if they were
+on fire. Crawling against the wind along a wider ledge at the top, they
+came to a chasm, crossed by a foot-wide causeway. The wind bowled and
+moaned in it, and the futile lantern rays only suggested unimaginable,
+things--death the least of them.
+
+"Art thou afraid?" asked Ismail, holding the lantern to King's face.
+
+"Kuch dar nahin hai!" he answered. "There is no such thing as fear!"
+
+It was a bold answer, and Ismail laughed, knowing well that neither of
+them believed a word of it at that moment. Only, each thought better
+of the other, that the one should have cared to ask, and that the other
+should be willing to give the lie to a fear that crawled and could be
+felt. Too many men are willing to admit they are afraid. Too many would
+rather condemn and despise than ask and laugh. But it is on the edges of
+eternity that men find each other out, and sympathize.
+
+Ismail went down on his hands and knees, lifting the lantern along a
+foot at a time in front of him and carrying it in his teeth by the bail
+the last part of the way. It seemed like an hour before he stood up,
+nearly a hundred yards away on the far side, and yelled for King to
+follow.
+
+The wind snatched the yells away, but the waving lantern beckoned him,
+and King knelt down in the dark. It happened that he laid his hand on a
+loose stone, the size of his head, near the edge. He shoved it over and
+listened. He listened for a minute but did not hear it strike anything,
+and the shudder, that he could not repress, came from the middle of his
+backbone and spread outward through each fiber of his being. If he had
+delayed another second his courage would have failed; he began at once
+to crawl to where Ismail stood swinging the light.
+
+There was room on the ledge for his knees and no more. Toes and fingers
+were overside. He sat down as on horseback, and transferred both
+slippers to his pockets, and then went forward again with bare feet,
+waiting whenever the wind snatched at him with redoubled fury, to lean
+against it and grip the rock with numb fingers. Ismail swung the lamp,
+for reasons best known to himself, and half-way over King sat astride
+the ridge again to shout to him to hold it still. But Ismail did not
+understand him.
+
+"Khinjan graves are deep!" he howled back. "Fear and the shadow of death
+are one!"
+
+He swung the lamp even more violently, as if it were a charm that could
+exorcise fear and bring a man over safely. The shadows danced until
+his brain reeled, and King swore he would thrash the fool as soon as he
+could reach him. He lay belly-downward on the rock and crawled like an
+insect the remainder of the way.
+
+And as if aware of his intention Ismail started to hurry on while
+there was yet a yard or two to crawl, and anger not being a load worth
+carrying, nor revenge a thing permitted to interfere with the sirkar's
+business, King let both die.
+
+Hunted by the wind, they ran round a bold shoulder of cliff into another
+black-dark tunnel. There the wind died, swallowed in a hundred fissures,
+but the track grew worse and steeper until they had to cling with both
+hands and climb and now and then Ismail set the lantern on a ledge
+and lowered his girdle to help King up. Sometimes he stood on King's
+shoulder in order to reach a higher level. They climbed for an hour and
+dropped at last panting, on a ledge, after squeezing themselves under
+the corner of a boulder.
+
+The lantern light shone on a tiny trickle of cold water, and there
+Ismail drank deep, like a bull, before signing to King to imitate him.
+
+"A thirsty throat and a crazy head are one," he counseled. "A man needs
+wit and a wet tongue who would talk with her!"
+
+"Where is she?" asked King, when he had finished drinking.
+
+"Go and look!"
+
+Ismail gave him a sudden shove, that sent him feet first forward over
+the edge. He fell a distance rather greater than his own height,
+to another ledge and stood there looking up. He could see Ismail's
+red-rimmed eyes blinking down at him in the lantern light, but suddenly
+the Afridi blew the lamp out, and then the darkness became solid.
+Thought itself left off less than a yard away.
+
+"Ismail!" he whispered. But Ismail did not answer him.
+
+He faced about, leaning against the rock, with the flat of both bands
+pressed tight against it for the sake of its company; and almost at once
+he saw a little bright red light glowing in the distance. It might have
+been a hundred yards, and it might have been a mile away below him; it
+was perfectly impossible to judge, for the darkness was not measurable.
+
+"Flowers turn to the light!" droned Ismail's voice above sententiously,
+and turning, he thought he could see red eyes peering over the rock. He
+jumped, and made a grab for the flowing beard that surely must be below
+them, but he missed.
+
+"Little fish swim to the light!" droned Ismail. "Moths fly to the light!
+Who is a man that he should know less than they?"
+
+He turned again and stared at the light. Dimly, very vaguely be could
+make out that a causeway led downward from almost where he stood. He was
+convinced that should he try to climb back Ismail would merely reach out
+a hand and shove him down again, and there was no sense in being put to
+that indignity. He decided to go forward, for there was even less sense
+in standing still.
+
+"Come with me! Come along, Ismail!" he called.
+
+"Allah! Hear him! Nay, nay, nay! Who was it said a little while ago,
+'There is no such thing as fear!' I am afraid, but thou and I are two
+men! Go thou alone!"
+
+Reason is a man's only dependable faculty. Reason told him that at a
+word from Yasmini he would have been flung into "Earth's Drink" hours
+ago. Therefore, added reason, why should she forego that spectacular
+opportunity when his death would have amused Khinjan's thousands, only
+to kill him now in the dark alone? He had treated a few dozen sick men,
+surely she had not been afraid to offend them. Had she not dared forbid
+the sick coming to him altogether? "Forward!" says Cocker, in at least a
+dozen places. "Go forward and find out! Better a bed in hell than a seat
+on the horns of a dilemma! Forward!"
+
+There was no sound now anywhere. He stretched a leg downward and felt
+a rock two or three feet lower down, and the sound of his slipper sole
+touching it, being the only noise, made the short hair rise on the back
+of his neck. Then he took himself, so to speak, by the hand and went
+forward and downward, for action is the only curb imagination knows.
+
+He forgot to count his pulse and judge how long it took him to descend
+that causeway in the dark. It was not so very rough, nor so very
+dangerous, but of course he only knew that fact afterward. He had to
+grope his way inch by inch, trusting to sense of touch and the British
+army's everlasting luck, with an eye all the while on a red light that
+was something like the glow through hell's keyhole.
+
+When he reached bottom, after perhaps twenty minutes, and stood at last
+on comparatively level rock, his legs were trembling from tension, and
+he had to sit down while he stretched them out and rested. The light
+still looked a quarter of a mile away, although that was guesswork. It
+made scarcely more impression on the surrounding darkness than one coal
+glowing in a cellar. The silence began to make his head ache.
+
+He got up and started forward, but just as he did that he thought he
+heard a footstep. He suspected Ismail might be following after all.
+
+"Ismail!" he called, trying to peer through the dark.
+
+But all the darkness had its home there. He could not even see his own
+hand stretched out. His own voice made him jump; after a second's pause
+it began to crack and rattle from wall to wall and from roof to floor,
+until at last the echoing word became one again and died with a hiss
+somewhere in the bowels of the world--Mbisssss!--like the sound of hot
+iron being plunged into a blacksmith's trough with a little after-murmur
+of complaining water.
+
+But then he was sure he heard a footstep! He faced about; and now there
+were two red lights where there had been only one. They seemed rather
+nearer, perhaps because there were two of them.
+
+"Hullo, King sahib!" said a voice he recognized; and he choked. He felt
+that if he had coughed his heart would have lain on the floor!
+
+"Are you afraid, King sahib?" said the Rangar Rewa Gunga's voice, and
+he took a step forward to be closer to his questioner. He found himself
+beside a rock, looking up at the Rangar's turban, that peered over the
+top of it. He could dimly make out the Rangar's dark eyes.
+
+"I would be afraid if I were you!"
+
+Rewa Gunga flashed a little electric torch into his eyes, but after
+a few seconds he shifted it so that both their faces could be seen,
+although the Rangar's only very faintly.
+
+"I have come to warn you!"
+
+"Very good of you, I'm sure!" said King.
+
+"If she knew I were here, she would jolly well have my liver nailed to a
+wall! I come to advise you to go back!"
+
+"Have they taken Ali Masjid Fort?" King asked him.
+
+"Never mind, sahib, but listen! I have brought her bracelet! I stole it!
+She stole it from you, and I stole it back! Take it! Put it on and wear
+it! Use it as a passport out of Khinjan Caves--for no man dare touch you
+while you wear it--and as a passport down the Khyber into India! Go back
+to India and stay there! Take it and go! Quick! Take it!"
+
+"No, thanks!" said King.
+
+The Rangar laughed mirthlessly, shifting the light a little as King
+stepped aside to get a better view of him. He held the torch more
+cunningly than a Spanish lady holds a fan.
+
+"All Englishmen are fools--most of them stiff-necked fools," he
+asserted. "Bah! Do you think I do not know? Do you think anything
+is hidden from her? I know--and she knows--that you think you have a
+surprise in store for her! You think you will go to her, and she will
+say, 'King sahib, why did you throw that head into the river, and put me
+in danger from my men?' And you will say, will you not, 'Princess, that
+was my brother's head!'? Was that not what you intended? Is it not true?
+Does she not know it? She knows more than you know, King sahib! Because
+you showed me certain little courtesies, I have come to warn you to run
+away!"
+
+"Do you suppose she knows you are here?" King asked, and the Rangar
+laughed.
+
+"If she knows so much, and is able to read my mind from a distance,
+where does she suppose you are?" King insisted.
+
+The Rangar laughed again, leaning his chin on both fists and switching
+out the light.
+
+"Perhaps she sent me to warn you!"
+
+"Well," said King, "my brother commanded at Ali Masjid Fort. There are
+things I must ask her. How did she know that head was my brother's? What
+part had she in taking it from his shoulders? What did she mean by that
+song of hers?"
+
+The Rangar chuckled softly.
+
+"There are no fools in the world like Englishmen! Listen! You are being
+offered life and liberty! Here is the key to both!"
+
+He made the gold bracelet ring on the rock by way of explanation.
+
+"Take the key and go!"
+
+"No!" said King.
+
+"Very well, sahib! Hear the other side of it! Beyond those two red
+lights there is a curtain. This side of that curtain you are Athelstan
+King of the Khyber Rifles, or Kurram Khan, or whatever you care to call
+yourself. Beyond it, you are what she calls you! Choose!"
+
+King did not answer, so he continued after a pause.
+
+"You shall pass behind that curtain, if you insist. Beyond it you shall
+know what she knows about Ali Masjid and your brother's head! You shall
+know all that she knows! There shall be no secrets between you and her!
+She shall translate the meaning of her song to you! But you shall never
+come out again King of the Khyber Rifles, or Kurram Khan! If you ever
+come out again, it shall be as you never dreamed, bearing arms you never
+saw yet, and you shall cut with your own hand the ties that bind you to
+England! Choose!"
+
+"I chose long ago," said King.
+
+"Are the gentle English never serious?" the Rangar asked. "Will you not
+understand that if you pass that curtain you shall know all things
+that Yasmini knows, but that you shall cease to be yourself?
+Cease--to--be--yourself! Is my meaning clear?"
+
+"Not in the least," said King, "but I hope mine is!"
+
+"You will go forward?"
+
+"Yes," said King.
+
+Rewa Gunga made no answer to that, although King waited for an answer.
+For about a minute there was no sound at all, except the beating of
+King's heart. Then he moved to try and see the Rangar's turban above the
+rock. He could not see it. He found a niche in the rock, set his foot
+in it and mounted three or four feet, until his head was level with the
+top. The Rangar was gone!
+
+He listened for two or three minutes, but the silence began to make his
+head ache again; so he stooped to feel the floor with his hand before
+deciding to go forward. There was no mistaking the finish given by the
+tread of countless feet. He was on a highway, and there are not often
+pitfalls where so many feet have been.
+
+For all that he went forward as a certain Agag once did, and it was many
+minutes before he could see a curtain glowing blood-red in the light
+behind the two lamps, at the top of a flight of ten stone steps. It
+was peculiar to him and to his service that he counted the steps before
+going nearer.
+
+When he went quite close he saw carpet down the middle of the steps,
+so ancient that the stone showed through in places; all the pattern,
+supposing it ever had any, was worn or faded away. Carpet and steps
+glowed red too. His own face, and the hands he held in front of him
+were red-hot-poker color. Yet outside the little ellipse of light the
+darkness looked like a thing to lean against, and the silence was so
+intense that he could hear the arteries singing by his ears.
+
+He saw the curtains move slightly, apparently in a little puff of wind
+that made the lamps waver. He was very nearly sure he heard a footfall
+beyond the curtains and a tinkle--as of a tiny silver bell, or a jewel
+striking against another one.
+
+He kicked his slippers off, because there are no conditions under which
+bad manners ever are good policy. Wide history and Cocker's famous code.
+Then he walked up the steps without treading on the carpet, because
+living scorpions have been known to be placed under carpets on purpose
+on occasion. And at the top, being a Secret Service man, he stooped to
+examine the lamps.
+
+They were bronze, cast, polished and graved. All round the circumference
+of each bowl were figures in half-relief, representing a woman dancing.
+She was the woman of the knife-hilt, and of the lamps in the arena! She
+looked like Yasmini! Only she could not be Yasmini because these lamps
+were so ancient and so rare that he had never seen any in the least like
+them, although he had visited most of the museums of the East.
+
+Both lamps were alike, for he crossed over to make sure and took each in
+his hands in turn. But no two figures of the dance were alike on
+either. It was the same woman dancing, but the artist had chosen twenty
+different poses with which to immortalize his skill, and hers. Both
+lamps burned sweet oil with a wick, and each had a chimney of horn, not
+at all unlike a modern lamp-chimney. The horn was stained red.
+
+As he set the second lamp down he became aware of a subtle interesting
+smell, and memory took back at once to Yasmini's room in the Chandni
+Chowk in Delhi where he had smelled it first. It was the peculiar scent
+he had been told was Yasmini's own--a blend of scents, like a chord of
+music, in which musk did not predominate.
+
+He took three strides and touched the curtains, discovering now for the
+first time that there were two of them, divided down the middle. They
+were about eight feet high, and each three feet wide, of leather, and
+though they looked old as the "Hills" themselves the leather was supple
+as good cloth. They had once been decorated with figures in gold leaf,
+but only a little patch of yellow here and there remained to hint at
+faded glories.
+
+He decided to remember his manners again, and at least to make
+opportunity for an invitation.
+
+"Kurram Khan hai!" he announced, forgetting the echo. But the echo was
+the only answer. It cackled at him, cracking back and forth down the
+cavern to die with a groan in illimitable darkness.
+
+"Kurram-urram-urram-urram-urram-ahn-hai! Urram-urram-urram-urram-ahn-hai!
+Urram-urram-urram-ah-hh-ough-ah!"
+
+There was no sound beyond the curtains. No answer. Only he thought the
+strange scent grew stronger. He decided to go forward. With his heart in
+his mouth he parted the curtains with both hands, startled by the sharp
+jangle of metal rings on a rod.
+
+So he stood, with arms outstretched, staring--staring--staring--with
+eyes skilled swiftly to take in details, but with a brain that tried to
+explain--formed a hundred wild suggestions--and then reeled. He was face
+to face with the unexplainable--the riddle of Khinjan Caves.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIII
+
+
+
+     Grand was thy goal! Thy vision new!
+             Ave, Caesar!
+     Conquest?  Ends of Earth thy view?
+             Ave, Caesar!
+     To sow--to reap--to play God's game?
+     How many Caesars did that same
+     Until the great, grim Reaper came!
+     Who ploughs with death shall garner rue,
+     And under all skies is nothing new.
+             Vale, Caesar!
+
+
+Telling the story afterward King never made any effort to describe
+his own sensations. It was surely enough to state what he saw, after a
+breathless climb among the rat-runs of a mountain with his imagination
+fired already by what had happened in the Cavern of Earth's Drink.
+
+The leather curtains slipped through his fingers and closed behind him
+with the clash of rings on a rod. But he was beyond being startled. He
+was not really sure he was in the world. He knew he was awake, and he
+knew he was glad he had left his shoes outside. But he was not certain
+whether it was the twentieth century, or fifty-five B. C., or earlier
+yet; or whether time had ceased. Very vividly in that minute there
+flashed before his mind Mark Twain's suggestion of the Transposition of
+Epochs.
+
+The place where he was did not look like a cave, but a palace chamber,
+for the rock walls had been trimmed square and polished smooth; then
+they had been painted pure white, except for a wide blue frieze, with
+a line of gold-leaf drawn underneath it. And on the frieze, done in
+gold-leaf too, was the Grecian lady of the lamps, always dancing. There
+were fifty or sixty figures of her, no two the same.
+
+A dozen lamps were burning, set in niches cut in the walls at measured
+intervals. They were exactly like the two outside, except that their
+horn chimneys were stained yellow instead of red, suffusing everything
+in a golden glow.
+
+Opposite him was a curtain, rather like that through which he had
+entered. Near to the curtain was a bed, whose great wooden posts were
+cracked with age. And it was at the bed he stared, with eyes that took
+in every detail but refused to believe.
+
+In spite of its age it was spread with fine new linen. Richly
+embroidered, not very ancient Indian draperies hung down from it to
+the floor on either side. On it, above the linen, a man and a woman lay
+hand-in-hand; and the woman was so exactly like Yasmini, even to her
+clothing, and her naked feet, that it was not possible for a man to be
+self-possessed.
+
+They both seemed asleep. It was as if Yasmini, weary from the dancing,
+had laid herself to sleep beside her lord. But who was he? And why did
+he wear Roman armor? And why was there no guard to keep intruders out?
+
+It was minutes before he satisfied himself that the man's breast did not
+rise and fall under the bronze armor and that the woman's jeweled gauzy
+stuff was still. Imagination played such tricks with him that in the
+stillness he imagined he heard breathing.
+
+After he was sure they were both dead, he went nearer, but it was a
+minute yet before he knew the woman was not she. At first a wild thought
+possessed him that she had killed herself.
+
+The only thing to show who he had been were the letters S. P. Q. R. on a
+great plumed helmet, on a little table by the bed. But she was the woman
+of the lamp-bowls and the frieze. A life-size stone statue in a corner
+was so like her, and like Yasmini too, that it was difficult to decide
+which of the two it represented.
+
+She had lived when he did, for her fingers were locked in his. And he
+had lived two thousand years ago, because his armor was about as old as
+that, and for proof that he had died in it part of his breast had turned
+to powder inside the breastplate. The rest of his body was whole and
+perfectly preserved.
+
+Stern, handsome in a high-beaked Roman way, gray on the temples,
+firm-lipped, he lay like an emperor in harness. But the pride and
+resolution on his face were outdone by the serenity of hers. Very surely
+those two had been lovers.
+
+Something--he could not decide what--about the man's appearance kept him
+staring for ten minutes, holding his breath unconsciously and letting
+it out in little silent gasps. It annoyed him that he could not pin down
+the elusive thing; and when he went on presently to be curious about
+more tangible things, it was only to be faced with the unexplainable at
+every turn.
+
+How had the bodies been preserved, for instance? They were perfect,
+except for that one detail of the man's breast. The air was full of the
+perfume he had learned to recognize as Yasmini's, but there was no sniff
+about the bodies of pitch or bitumen, or of any other chemical. Nor
+was there any sign of violence about them, or means of telling how they
+died, or when, except for the probable date of the man's armor.
+
+Both of them looked young and healthy--the woman younger than
+thirty--twenty-five at a guess--and the man perhaps forty, perhaps
+forty-five.
+
+He bent over them. Every stitch of the man's clothing had decayed in the
+course of centuries, so that his armor rested on the naked skin, except
+for a dressed leather kilt about his middle. The leather was as old as
+the curtains at the entrance, and as well preserved.
+
+But the woman's silken clothing was as new as the bedding; and that was
+so new that it had been woven in Belfast, Ireland, by machinery and bore
+the mark of the firm that made it!
+
+Yet, they both died at about the same time, or how could their fingers
+have been interlaced? And some of the jewelry on the woman's clothes was
+very ancient as well as priceless.
+
+He looked closer at the fingers for signs of force and suddenly caught
+his breath. Under the woman's flimsy sleeve was a wrought gold
+bracelet, smaller than that one he himself had worn in Delhi and up the
+Khyber--exactly like the little one that Yasmini wore on her wrist in
+the Cavern of Earth's Drink! He raised the loose sleeve to look more
+closely at it.
+
+The sleeve overlay the man's forearm, and the movement laid bare another
+bracelet, on the man's right wrist. Size for size, this was the same as
+the one that had been stolen from himself.
+
+Memory prompted him. He felt its outer edge with a finger-nail. There
+was the little nick that he had made in the soft gold when he struck it
+against the cell bars in the jail at the Mir Khan Palace!
+
+That put another thought in his head. It was less than two hours since
+Yasmini danced in the arena. It might well be much less than that since
+she had taken off her bracelets. He laid a finger on the dead man's
+stone-cold hand and let it rest so for a minute. Then, running it slowly
+up the wrist, he touched the gold. It was warm. He repeated the test on
+the woman's wrist. Hers was warm, too. Both bracelets had been worn by a
+living being within an hour--
+
+"Probably within minutes!"
+
+He muttered and frowned in thought, and then suddenly jumped backward.
+The leather curtain near the bed had moved on its bronze rod.
+
+"Aren't they dears?" a voice said in English behind him. "Aren't they
+sweet?"
+
+He had jumped so as to face about, and somebody laughed at him. Yasmini
+stood not two arms' lengths away, lovelier than the dead woman because
+of the merry life in her, young and warm, aglow, but looking like
+the dead woman and the woman of the frieze--the woman of the
+lamp--bowls--the statue--come to life, speaking to him in English more
+sweetly than if it had been her mother tongue. The English abuse their
+language. Yasmini caressed it and made it do its work twice over.
+
+Being dressed as a native, he salaamed low. Knowing him for what he was,
+she gave him the senna-stained tips of her warm fingers to kiss, and he
+thought she trembled when he touched them. But a second later she had
+snatched them away and was treating him to raillery.
+
+"Man of pills and blisters!" she said, "tell me how those bodies are
+preserved! Spill knowledge from that learned skull of thine!"
+
+He did not answer. He never shone in conversation at any time, having
+made as many friends as enemies by saying nothing until the spirit moves
+him. But she did not know that yet.
+
+"If I knew for certain why those two did not turn to worms," she went
+on, "almost I would choose to die now, while I am beautiful! Think
+of the fogy museum men!" (She called them by a far less edifying name,
+really, for the East is frank in that way, especially in its use of
+other tongues.) "What would they say, think you, King sahib, if they
+found us two dead beside those two? Would not that be a mystery? Don't
+you love mysteries? Speak, man, speak! Has Khinjan struck you dumb?"
+
+But he did not speak. He was staring at her arm, where two whitish marks
+on the skin betrayed that bracelets had been.
+
+"Oh, those! They are theirs. I would not rob the dead, or the gods would
+turn on me. I robbed you, instead, while you slept. Fie, King sahib,
+while you slept!"
+
+But her steel did not strike on flint. It was her eyes that flashed. He
+would have done better to have seemed ashamed, for then he might have
+fooled her, at least for a while. But having judged himself, he did
+not care a fig for her judgment of him. She realized that instantly and
+having found a tool that would not work, discarded it for a better one.
+She grew confidential.
+
+"I borrow them," she explained, "but I put them back. I take them for
+so many days, and when the day comes--the gods like us to be exact! Once
+there was an Englishman to whom I lent the larger one, and he refused
+to return it. He wanted it to wear, to bring him luck. Collins, of the
+Gurkhas. A cobra bit him."
+
+King's eyes changed, for Collins of the Gurkhas had died in his two
+arms, saying never a word. He had always wondered why the native who
+ran in to kill the cobra had run away again and left Collins lying there
+after seeming to shake hands with him. Yasmini, watching his eyes and
+reading his memory, missed nothing.
+
+"You saw?" she said excitedly. "You remember? Then you understand! You
+yourself were near death when I took the bracelet last night. The time
+was up. I would have stabbed you if you had tried to prevent me!"
+
+Now he spoke at last and gave her a first glimpse of an angle of his
+mind she had not suspected.
+
+"Princess," he said. He used the word with the deference some men can
+combine with effrontery, so that very tenderness has barbs. "You might
+have had that thing back if you had sent a messenger for it at any time.
+A word by a servant would have been enough.
+
+"You could never have reached Khinjan then!" she retorted. Her eyes
+flashed again, but his did not waver.
+
+"Princess," he said, "why speak of what you don't know?"
+
+He thought she would strike like a snake, but she smiled at him instead.
+And when Yasmini has smiled on a man he has never been just the same man
+afterward. He knows more, for one thing. He has had a lesson in one of
+the finer arts.
+
+"I will speak of what I do know," she said. "No, there is no need. Look!
+Look!"
+
+She pointed at the bed--at the man on the bed--fingers locked in those
+of a woman who looked so like herself.
+
+"You see--yet you do not see! Men are blind! Men look into a mirror, and
+see only whiskers they forgot to shave the day before. Women look once
+and then remember! Look again!"
+
+He looked, knowing well there was something to be understood, that
+stared him in the face. But for the life of him he could not determine
+question or answer.
+
+"What is in your bosom?" she asked him.
+
+He put his band to his shirt.
+
+"Draw it out!" she said, as a teacher drills a child.
+
+He drew out the gold-hilted knife with the bronze blade, with which a
+man had meant to murder him. He let it lie on the palm of his hand
+and looked from it to her and back again. The hilt might have been a
+portrait of her modeled from the life.
+
+"Here is another like it," she said, stepping to the bedside. She drew
+back the woman's dress at the bosom and showed a knife exactly like that
+in King's hand. "One lay on her bosom and one on his when I found them!"
+she said. "Now, think again!"
+
+He did think, of thirty thousand possibilities, and of one impossible
+idea that stood up prominent among them all and insisted on seeming the
+only likely one.
+
+"I saw the knife in your bosom last night," she said, "and laughed so
+that I nearly wakened you. Man! Are you stupid? Will that ready wit of
+yours not work? Have I bewildered you? Is it my perfume? My eyes? My
+jewels? What is it? Think, man! Think!"
+
+But if she wanted to make him guess aloud for her amusement she was
+wasting time. Had he known the answer he would have held his tongue. As
+he did not know it, he had all the more reason to wait indefinitely, if
+need be. But interminable waiting was no part of her plan. Words were
+welling out of her.
+
+"I gave a fool that knife to use, because he was afraid. It gave him
+courage. When he failed I knew it by telegram, and I sent another fool
+before the wires were cold, to kill him in the police-station cell for
+having failed. One fool has been stabbed and the English will hang the
+other. Then I sent twenty men to turn India inside out and find the
+knife again, for like the bracelets it has its place. And that is why I
+laughed. They are hunting. They will hunt until I call them off!"
+
+"Why didn't you take it with the bracelet?" King asked her, holding it
+out. "Take it now. I don't want it."
+
+She accepted it and laid it on the man's bronze armor. Then, however,
+she resumed it and played with it.
+
+"Look again!" she said. "Think and look again!"
+
+He looked, and he knew now. But he still preferred that she should tell
+him, and his lips shut tight.
+
+"Why, having ordered your death, did I countermand the order when your
+life had been attempted once? Why, as soon as Rewa Gunga had seen you,
+did I order you to be aided in every way?"
+
+Still he did not answer, although the solution to that riddle, too,
+was beginning to dawn on his consciousness. He suspected she would be
+annoyed if he deprived her of the fun of telling him, so that by being
+silent he played both her game and his own.
+
+"Why did I order your death in the first place?"
+
+The answer to that was obvious, but she answered it for him.
+
+"Because, since the sirkar insisted that one man must come with me to
+Khinjan, I preferred a fool, who could be lost on the way. I knew your
+reputation. I never heard any man call you a fool."
+
+She laughed. He nodded. She was obviously telling truth.
+
+"Can you guess why I changed my mind about you--wise man?"
+
+She looked from him to the man on the bed and back to him again. Having
+solved her riddle, King had leisure to be interested in her eyes, and
+watched them analytically, like a jeweler appraising diamonds. They were
+strangely reminiscent, but much more changeable and colorful than any he
+had ever seen. They had the baffling trick of changing while he watched
+them.
+
+"Having sent a man to kill you, why did I cease to want you killed?
+Instead of losing you on the way to Khinjan, why did I run risks to
+protect you after you reached here? Why did I save your life in the
+Cavern of Earth's Drink to-night? You do not know yet? Then I will tell
+you something else you do not know. I was in Delhi when you were! I
+watched and listened while you and Rewa Gunga talked in my house! I was
+in Rewa Gunga's carriage on the train that he took and you did not! I
+have learned at first hand that you are not a fool. But that was not
+enough! You had to be three things--clever and brave and one other. The
+one other you are! Brave you have proved yourself to be! Clever you
+must be, to trick your way into Khinjan Caves, even with Ismail at your
+elbow! That is why I saved your life--because you are those two things
+and--and--one other!"
+
+She snatched a mirror from a little ivory table--a modern mirror--bad
+glass, bad art, bad workmanship, but silver warranted.
+
+"Look in it and then at him!" she ordered.
+
+But he did not need to look. The man on the bed was not so much like
+himself as the woman was like her, but the resemblance seemed to grow
+under his eyes, as such things do. It was helped out by the stain his
+brother had applied to his face in the Khyber. King was the taller
+and the younger by several years, but the noses were the same, and the
+wrinkled fore-heads; both men had the same firm mouth; both looked like
+Romans.
+
+"How did you get that scar?"
+
+She came closer and took his hand, holding it in both hers, and he felt
+the same thrill Samson knew. He steeled himself as Samson did not.
+
+"A Mahsudi got me with a martini at long range in the blockade of 1902,"
+he said dryly.
+
+"Look! Did he get his from a spear or from an arrow?"
+
+Almost in the same spot, also on the dead man's left hand, was a scar
+so nearly like it that it needed a third and a fourth glance to tell the
+difference. They both bent over the bed to see it, and she laid a
+hand on his shoulder. Touch and scent and confidence, all three were
+bewitching; all three were calculated, too! He could have killed her,
+and she knew he could have killed her, just as she knew he would not.
+Yet what right had she to know it!
+
+"Athelstan!"
+
+She pronounced his given name as if she loved the word, standing
+straight again and looking into his eyes. There were high lights in hers
+that outgleamed the diamonds on her dress.
+
+"Your gods and mine have done this, Athelstan. When the gods combine
+they lay plans well indeed!"
+
+"I only know one God," he answered simply, as a man speaks of the deep
+things in his heart.
+
+"I know of many! They love me! They shall love you, too! Many are better
+than one! You shall learn to know my gods, for we are to be partners,
+you and I!"
+
+She laughed at him, looking like a goddess herself, but he frowned. And
+the more he frowned the better she seemed to like him.
+
+"Partners in what, Princess?"
+
+"Thou--Ismail dubbed thee Ready o' wit!--answer thine own question!"
+
+She took his hand again, her eyes burning with excitement and mysticism
+and ambition like a fever. She seemed to take more than physical
+possession of him.
+
+"What brought them here? Tell me that!" she demanded, pointing to the
+bed. "You think he brought, her? I tell you she was the spur that drove
+him! Is it a wonder that men called her the 'Heart of the Hills'? I
+found them ten years ago and clothed her and put new linen on their bed,
+for the old was all rags and dust. There have always been hundreds--and
+sometimes thousands--who knew the secret of Khinjan Caves, but this has
+been a secret within a secret. Some one, who knew the secret before I,
+sawed those bracelets through and fitted hinges and clasps. The men you
+saw in the Cavern of Earth's Drink have no doubt I am the 'Heart of the
+Hills' come to life! They shall know thee as Him within a little while!"
+
+She held his hand a little tighter and pressed closer to him, laughing
+softly. He stood as if made of iron, and that only made her laugh the
+more.
+
+"Tales of the 'Heart of the Hills' have puzzled the Raj, haven't they,
+these many years? They sent me to find the source of them. Me! They
+chose well! There are not many like me! I have found this one dead woman
+who was like me. And in ten years, until you came, I have found no man
+like Him!"
+
+She tried to look into his eyes, but he frowned straight in front of
+him. His native costume and Rangar turban did not make him seem any less
+a man. His jowl, that was beginning to need shaving, was as grim and
+as satisfying as the dead Roman's. She stroked his left hand with soft
+fingers.
+
+"I used to think I knew how to dance!" she laughed--"For ten years I
+have taken those pictures of her for my model and have striven to learn
+what she knew. I have surpassed her! I used to think I knew how to amuse
+myself with men's dreams--until I found this! Then I dreamed on my own
+account! My dream was true, my warrior! You have come! Our hour has
+come!"
+
+She tugged at his hand. He was hers, soul and harness, if outward signs
+could prove it.
+
+"Come!" she said. "Is this my hospitality? You are weary and hungry.
+Come!"
+
+She led him by the hand, for it would have needed brute force to pry her
+fingers loose. She drew aside the leather curtain that hung on a bronze
+rod near the bed, led him through it, and let it clash to again behind
+them.
+
+Now they were in the dark together, and it was not comprehended in her
+scheme of things to let circumstance lie fallow. She pressed his hand,
+and sighed, and then hurried, whispering tender words he could scarcely
+catch. When they burst together through a curtain at the other end of
+a passage in the rock, his skin was red under the tan and for the first
+time her eyes refused to meet his.
+
+"Why did they choose that cave to sleep in?" she asked him. "Is not this
+a better one? Who laid them there?"
+
+He stared about. They were in a great room far more splendid than the
+first. There was a fountain in the center splashing in the midst of
+flowers. They were cut flowers. The "Hills" must have been scoured for
+them within a day.
+
+There were great cushioned couches all about and two thrones made of
+ivory and gold. Between two couches was a table, laden with golden
+plates and a golden jug, on pure white linen. There were two goblets of
+beaten gold and knives with golden handles and bronze blades. The whole
+room seemed to be drenched in the scent Yasmini favored, and there was
+the same frieze running round all four walls, with the woman depicted on
+it dancing.
+
+"Come, we shall eat!" she said, leading him by the hand to a couch. She
+took the one facing him, and they lay like two Romans of the Empire with
+the table in between.
+
+She struck a golden gong then, and a native woman came in who stared at
+King as if she had seen him before and did not like him. Except for the
+jewels, she was dressed exactly like Yasmini, which is to say that her
+gauzy stuff was all but transparent. But Yasmini uses raiment as she
+does her eyes; it is part of her, and of her art. The maid, who would
+have shone among many women, looked stiff and dull by contrast.
+
+"I trust no Hill woman--they are cattle with human tongues," Yasmini
+said, frowning at the maid. "Even in Delhi there was only this one woman
+whom I dared bring here with me. You brought my men-servants! They
+are loyal, but as clumsy as the bears in their cold 'Hills'! Rewa Gunga
+brought me this one disguised as a man--you remember?"
+
+She nodded to the servant, who clapped her hands. At once came a stream
+of Hillmen, robed in white, who carried sherbet in bottles cooled in
+snow and dishes fragrant with hot food. He recognized his own prisoners
+from the Mir Khan Palace jail, and nodded to them as they set the things
+down under the maid's direction. When they had done the woman chased
+them out and came and stood behind Yasmini with a fan, for though it was
+not too hot, she liked to have her golden hair blown into movement.
+
+"My cook was a viceroy's," she said, beginning to eat. "He killed an
+officer who said the curry had pig's fat in it. That made him free of
+Khinjan but of not many other places! I have promised him a swim in
+Earth's Drink when he ever forgets his art!"
+
+King ate, because a man can not talk and eat at once. It was true that
+he was hungry, that hunger is a piquant sauce, and that artist was an
+adjective too mild to apply to the cook. But the other reason was his
+chief one. Yasmini ate daintily, as if only to keep him company.
+
+"You would rather have wine?" she asked suddenly. "All sahibs drink
+wine. Bring wine!" she ordered.
+
+But King shook his head, and she looked pleased.
+
+He had thought she would be disappointed. When he had finished eating
+she drove the maid away with a sharp word; and when King jumped to his
+feet she led him toward the gold-and-ivory thrones, taking her seat on
+one of them and bidding him adjust the footstool.
+
+"Would I might offer you the other!" she said, merrily enough, "but you
+must sit at my feet until our hearts are one!"
+
+It was clear that she took no delight in easy victories, for she laughed
+aloud at the quizzical expression on his face. He guessed that if she
+could have conquered him at the first attempt a day would have found her
+weary of him; there was deliberate wisdom in his plan for the present to
+seem to let her win by little inches at a time. He reasoned that so she
+would tell him more than if he defied her outright.
+
+He brought an ivory footstool and set it about a yard away from her
+waxen toes. And she, watching him with burning eyes, wound tresses of
+her hair around the golden dagger handle, making her jewels glitter with
+each movement.
+
+"You pleased me by refusing wine," she said. "You please me--oh, you
+please me! Christians drink wine and eat beef and pig-meat. Ugh! Hindu
+and Muslim both despise them, having each a little understanding of his
+own. The gods of India, who are the only real gods, what do they think
+of it all! They have been good to the English, but they have had no
+thanks. They will stand aside now and watch a greater jihad than the
+world has ever seen! And the Hindu, who holds the cow sacred, will not
+support Christians who hold nothing sacred, against Muhammadans who
+loathe the pig! Christianity has failed! The English must go down with
+it--just as Rome went down when she dabbled in Christianity. Oh, I know
+all about Rome!"
+
+"And the gods of India?" he asked, to keep her to the point now that she
+seemed well started.
+
+He was there to learn, not to teach.
+
+"I know them, too! I know them as nobody else does! They are neither
+Hindu, nor Muhammadan, but are older by a thousand ages than either
+foolishness! I love them, and they love me--as you shall love me, too!
+If they did not love both of us, we would not both be here! We must obey
+them!"
+
+None of the East's amazing ways of courtship are ever tedious. Love
+springs into being on an instant and lives a thousand years inside an
+hour. She left no doubt as to her meaning. She and King were to love,
+as the East knows love, and then the world might have just what they two
+did not care to take from it.
+
+His only possible course as yet was the defensive, and there is no
+defense like silence. He was still.
+
+"The sirkar," she went on, "the silly sirkar fears that perhaps Turkey
+may enter the war. Perhaps a jihad may be proclaimed. So much for fear!
+I know! I have known for a very long time! And I have not let fear
+trouble me at all!"
+
+Her eyes were on his steadily, and she read no fear in his,
+either, for none was there. In hers he saw ambition--triumph
+already--excitement--the gambler's love of all the hugest risks. Behind
+them burned genius and the devilry that would stop at nothing. As the
+general had told him in Peshawur, she would dare open Hell's gate and
+ride the devil down the Khyber for the fun of it.
+
+"Au diable, diable et demie!" the French say; and like most French
+proverbs it is a wise one. But whence the devil and a half should come
+to thwart her was not obvious.
+
+"I must be a devil and a half," he told himself, and very nearly
+laughed aloud at the idea. She mistook the sudden humor in his eyes for
+admiration of herself, being used to that from men.
+
+"Listen, while I tell you all from the beginning! The sirkar sent me to
+discover what may be this 'Heart of the Hills' men talk about. I found
+these caves--and this! I told the sirkar a little about the Caves, and
+nothing at all about the Sleepers. But even at that they only believed
+the third of what I said. And I--back in Delhi I bought books--borrowed
+books--sent to Europe for more books--and hired babu Sita Ram to read
+them to me, until his tongue grew dry and swollen and he used
+to fall asleep in a corner. I know all about Rome! Days I
+spent--weeks!--months!--listening to the history of their great Caesar,
+and their little Caesars--of their conquests and their games! It was
+good, and I understood it all! Rome should have been true to the old
+gods, and they would have been true to her! She fell when she fooled
+with Christianity!"
+
+She was speaking dreamily now, with her chin resting on a hand and an
+elbow on the ivory arm of the throne, remembering as she told her story.
+And it meant so much to her, she was so in earnest, that her voice
+conjured up pictures for King to see.
+
+"When I had read enough I came back here to think. I knew enough now
+to be sure that the Sleeper is a Roman, and the 'Heart of the Hills' a
+Grecian maid. She is like me. That is why I know she drove him to make
+an empire, choosing for a beginning these 'Hills' where Rome had never
+penetrated. He found her in Greece. He plunged through Persia to build a
+throne for her! I have seen it all in dreams, and again in the crystal!
+And because I was all alone, I saw that I would need all the skill I
+could learn, and much patience. So I began to learn to dance as she
+danced, using those pictures of her as a model. I have surpassed her! I
+can dance better than she ever did!
+
+"Between times I would go to Delhi and dance there a little, and a
+little in other places--once indeed before a viceroy, and once for the
+king of England--and all men--the king, too!--told me that none in
+the world can dance as I can! And all the while I kept looking for the
+man--the man who should be like the Sleeper, even as I am like her whom
+he loved!
+
+"Many a man--many and many a man I have tried and found wanting! For I
+was impatient in spite of resolutions. I burned to find him at once, and
+begin! But you are the first of all the men I have tested who answered
+all the tests! Languages--he must speak the native tongues. Brave be
+must be--and clever--resembling the Sleeper in appearance. I began to
+think long ago that I must forego that last test, for there was none
+like the Sleeper until you came. And when this world war broke--for it
+is a world war, a world war I tell you!--I thought at last that I must
+manage all alone. And then you came!
+
+"But there were many I tried--many--especially after I abandoned the
+thought that the man must resemble the Sleeper. There was a Prince of
+Germany who came to India on a hunting trip. You remember?"
+
+King pricked his ears and allowed himself to grin, for in common with
+many hundred other men who had been lieutenants at the time, he would
+once have given an ear and an eye to know the truth of that affair. The
+grin transformed his whole appearance, until Yasmini beamed on him.
+
+"I'm listening, Princess!" he reminded her.
+
+"Well--he came--the Prince of Germany--the borrower!"
+
+"Borrower of what, Princess?"
+
+"Of wit! Of brains! Of platitudes! Of reputation! There came a crowd
+with him of such clumsy plunderers, asking such rude questions, that
+even the sirkar could not shut its ears and eyes!
+
+"I did not know all about sahibs in those days. I thought that, although
+this man is what he is, yet he is a prince, and perhaps I can fire him
+with my genius. I could have taught him the native tongues. I thought
+he had ambition, but I learned that he is only greedy. You see, I was
+foolish, not knowing yet that in good time if I am patient my man will
+come to me! But I learned all about Germans--all!
+
+"I offered him India first, then Asia, then the world--even as I now
+offer them to you. The sirkar sent him to see me dance, and he stayed
+to hear me talk. When I saw at last that he has the head and heart of a
+hyena I told him lies. But he, being drunk, told me truths that I have
+remembered.
+
+"Later he sent two of his officers to ask me questions, and they were
+little better than he, although a little better mannered. I told them
+lies, too, and they told me lies, but they told me much that was true.
+
+"Then the prince came again, a last time. And I was weary of him. The
+sirkar was very weary of him too. He offered me money to go to Germany
+and dance for the kaiser in Berlin. He said I will be shown there much
+that will be to my advantage. I refused. He made me other offers. So I
+spat in his face and threw food at him.
+
+"He complained to the sirkar against me, sending one of his high
+officers to demand that I be whipped. So I told the sirkar some--not
+much, indeed, but enough--of the things he and his officers had told
+me. And the sirkar said at once that there was both cholera and bubonic
+plague, and he must go home!
+
+"I have heard--three men told me--that he said he will never rest until
+I have been whipped! But I have heard that his officers laughed behind
+his back. And ever since that time there have always been Germans in
+communication with me. I have had more money from Berlin than would
+bribe the viceroy's council, and I have not once been in the dark about
+Germany's plans--although they have always thought I am in the dark.
+
+"I went on looking for my man--studying all, Germans, English, Turks,
+French--and there was a Frenchman whom I nearly chose--and an American,
+a man who used the strangest words, who laughed at me. I studied Hindu,
+Muslim, Christian, every good-looking fighting man who came my way,
+knowing well that all creeds are one when the gods have named their
+choice.
+
+"There came that old Bull-with-a-beard, Muhammad Anim, and for a time I
+thought he is the man, for he is a man whatever else he is. But I tired
+of him. I called him Bull-with-a-beard, and the 'Hills' took it up and
+mocked him, until the new name stuck. He still thinks he is the man,
+having more strength to hope and more will to will wrongly than any
+man I ever met, except a German. I have even been sure sometimes that
+Muhammad Anim is a German; yet now I am not sure.
+
+"From all the men I met and watched I have learned all they knew! And I
+have never neglected to tell the sirkar sufficient of what men have told
+me, to keep the sirkar pleased with me!
+
+"Nor have I ever played Germany's game--no, no! I have talked with a
+prince of Germany, and I understand too well! Who sups with a boar may
+get good roots to eat, but must endure pigs' feet in the trough! Pigs'
+hides make good saddles; I have used the Germans, as they think they
+have used me! I have used them ruthlessly.
+
+"Knowing all I knew, and being ready except that I had not found my man
+yet, I dallied in India on the eve of war, watching a certain Sikh to
+discover whether he is the man or not. But he lacked imagination, and
+I was caught in Delhi when war broke and the English dosed the Khyber
+Pass. Yet I had to come up the Khyber, to reach Khinjan.
+
+"So it was fortunate that I knew of a German plot that I could spoil
+at the last minute. I fooled the Germans by letting the Sikh whom I had
+watched discover it. The Germans still believe me their accomplice--and
+the sirkar was so pleased that I think if I had asked for an English
+peerage they would have answered me soberly. A million dynamite bombs
+was a big haul for the sirkar! My offer to go to Khinjan and keep the
+'Hills' quiet was accepted that same day!
+
+"But what are a million dynamite bombs! Dynamite bombs have been coming
+into Khinjan month by month these three years! Bombs and rifles and
+cartridges! Muhammad Anim's men, whom he trusts because he must, hid it
+all in a cave I showed them, that they think, and he thinks, has only
+one entrance to it. Muhammad Anim scaled it, and he has the key. But I
+have the ammunition!
+
+"There was another way out of that cave, although there is none now,
+for I have blocked it. My men, whom I trust because I know them, carried
+everything out by the back way, and I have it all. I will show it to you
+presently.
+
+"I know all Muhammad Anim's plans. Bull-with-a-beard believes himself a
+statesman, yet he told me all he knows! He has told me how Germany plans
+to draw Turkey in and to force Turkey to proclaim a jihad. As if I did
+not know it first, almost before the Germans knew it! Fools! The jihad
+will recoil on them! It will be like a cobra, striking whoever stirs
+it! A typhoon, smiting right and left! Christianity is doomed, and
+the Germans call themselves Christians! Fools! Rome called herself
+Christian--and where is Rome?
+
+"But we, my warrior, when Muhammad Anim gets the word from Germany and
+gives the sign, and the 'Hills' are afire, and the whole East roars in
+the flame of the jihad--we will put ourselves at the head of that jihad,
+and the East and the world is ours!"
+
+King smiled at her.
+
+"The East isn't very well armed," he objected. "Mere numbers--"
+
+"Numbers?" She laughed at him. "The West has the West by the throat!
+It is tearing itself! They will drag in America! There will be no armed
+nation with its hands free--and while those wolves fight, other wolves
+shall come and steal the meat! The old gods, who built these caverns in
+the 'Hills,' are laughing! They are getting ready! Thou and I--"
+
+As she coupled him and herself together in one plan she read the changed
+expression of his face--the very quickly passing cloud that even the
+best-trained man can not control.
+
+"I know!" she asserted, sitting upright and coming out of her dream
+to face facts as their master. She looked more lovely now than ever,
+although twice as dangerous. "You are thinking of your brother--of his
+head! That I am a murderess who can never be your friend! Is that not
+so?"
+
+He did not answer, but his eyes may have betrayed something, for
+she looked as if he had struck her. Leaning forward, she held the
+gold-hilted dagger out to him, hilt first.
+
+"Take it and stab me!" she ordered. "Stab--if you blame me for your
+brother's death! I should have known him for your brother if I had come
+on him in the dark!--His head might have come from your shoulders!--You
+were like a man holding up his own head, as I have seen in pictures in a
+book! I would never have killed him!"
+
+Her golden hair fell all about his shoulders, and its scent was not
+intended to be sobering. She ran warm fingers through his hair while she
+held the knife toward him with the other hand.
+
+"Take it and stab!"
+
+"No," he said.
+
+"No!" she laughed. "No! You are my warrior--my man--my well--beloved!
+You have come to me alone out of all the world! You would no more stab
+me than the gods would forget me!"
+
+Their eyes were on each other's--deep looking into deep.
+
+"Strength!" she said, flinging him away and leaning back to look at him,
+almost as a fed cat stretches in the sunlight. "Courage! Simplicity!
+Directness! Strength I have, too, and courage never failed me, but my
+mind is a river winding in and out, gathering as it goes. I have no
+directness--no simplicity! You go straight from point to point, my
+sending from the gods! I have needed you! Oh, I have needed you so much,
+these many years! And now that you have come you want to hate me because
+you think I killed your brother! Listen--I will tell you all I know
+about your brother."'
+
+Without a scrap of proof of any kind he knew she was telling truth
+unadorned--or at least the truth as she saw it. Eye to eye, there are
+times when no proof is needed.
+
+"Without my leave, Muhammad Anim sent five hundred men on a foray toward
+the Khyber. Bull-with-a-beard needed an Englishman's head, for proof
+for a spy of his who could not enter Khinjan Caves. They trapped your
+brother outside Ali Masjid with fifty of his men. They took his head
+after a long fight, leaving more than a hundred of their own in payment.
+
+"Bull-with-a-beard was pleased. But he was careless, and I sent my men
+to steal the head from his men. I needed evidence for you. And I swear
+to you--I swear to you by my gods who have brought us two together--that
+I first knew it was your brother's head when you held it up in the
+Cavern of Earth's Drink! Then I knew it could not be anybody else's
+head!"
+
+"Why bid me throw it to them, then?" he asked her, and he was aware of
+her scorn before the words had left his lips.
+
+She leaned back again and looked at him through lowered eyes, as if she
+must study him all anew. She seemed to find it hard to believe that he
+really thought so in the commonplace.
+
+"What is a head to me, or to you--a head with no life in
+it--carrion!--compared to what shall be? Would you have known it was his
+head if you had thrown it to them when I ordered you?"
+
+He understood. Some of her blood was Russian, some Indian.
+
+"A friend is a friend, but a brother is a rival," says the East, out of
+world-old experience, and in some ways Russia is more eastern than the
+East itself.
+
+"Muhammad Anim shall answer to you for your brother's head!" she said
+with a little nod, as if she were making concessions to a child. "At
+present we need him. Let him preach his jihad, and loose it at the
+right time. After that he will be in the way! You shall name his
+death--Earth's Drink--slow torture--fire! Will that content you?"
+
+"No," he said, with a dry laugh.
+
+"What more can you ask?"
+
+"Less! My brother died at the head of his men. He couldn't ask more. Let
+Bull-with-a-beard alone."
+
+She set both elbows on her knees and laid her chin on both hands to
+stare at him again. He began to remember long-forgotten schoolboy lore
+about chemical reagents, that dissolve materials into their component
+parts, such was the magic of her eyes. There were no eyes like hers that
+he had ever seen, although Rewa Gunga's had been something like them.
+Only Rewa Gunga's had not changed so. Thought of the Rangar no sooner
+crossed his mind than she was speaking of him.
+
+"Rewa Gunga met you in the dark, beyond those outer curtains, did he
+not?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Did he tell you that if you pass the curtains you shall be told all I
+know?"
+
+He nodded again, and she laughed.
+
+"It would take time to tell you all I know! First, I think I will show
+you things. Afterward you shall ask me questions, and I will answer
+them!"
+
+She stood up, and of course he stood up, too. So, she on the footstool
+of the throne, her eyes and his were on a level. She laid hands on
+his shoulders and looked into his eyes until he could see his own twin
+portraits in hers that were glowing sunset pools. Heart of the Hills?
+The Heart of all the East seemed to burn in her, rebellious!
+
+"Are you believing me?" she asked him.
+
+He nodded, for no man could have helped believing her. As she knew
+the truth, she was telling it to him, as surely as she was doing her
+skillful best to mesmerize him. But the Secret Service is made up of men
+trained against that.
+
+"Come!" she said, and stepping down she took his arm.
+
+She led him past the thrones to other leather curtains in a wall, and
+through them into long hewn passages from cavern into cavern, until even
+the Rock of Gibraltar seemed like a doll's house in comparison.
+
+In one cave there were piles of javelins that had been stacked there by
+the Sleeper and his men. In another were sheaves of arrows; and in one
+were spears in racks against a wall. There were empty stables, with
+rings made fast into the rock where a hundred horses could have stood in
+line.
+
+She showed him a cave containing great forges, where the bronze had been
+worked, with charcoal still piled up against the wall at one end. There
+were copper and tin ingots in there of a shape he had never seen.
+
+"I know where they came from," she told him. "I have made it my
+business to know all the 'Hills.' I know things the Hillmen's
+great-great-great-grand-fathers forgot! I know old workings that would
+make a modern nation rich! We shall have money when we need it, never
+fear! We shall conquer India while the English backs are turned and the
+best troops are oversea. We will bring a hundred thousand slaves back
+here to work our mines! With what they dig from the mines, copper and
+gold and tin, we will make ready to buy the English off when they are
+free to turn this way again. The English will do anything for money!
+They will be in debt when this war is over, and their price will be less
+then than now!"
+
+She laughed merrily at him because his face showed that he did not
+appreciate that stricture. Then she called him her Warrior and her
+Well-beloved and took him down a long passage, holding his hand all the
+way, to show him slots cut in the floor for the use of archers.
+
+"You entered Khinjan Caves by a tunnel under this floor, Well-beloved.
+There is no other entrance!"
+
+By this time Well-beloved was her name for him, although there was no
+air of finality about it. It was as if she paved the way for use of
+Athelstan and that was a sacred name. It was amazing how she conveyed
+that impression without using words.
+
+"The Sleeper cut these slots for his archers. Then he had another
+thought and set these cauldrons in place, to boil oil to pour down.
+Could any army force a way through by the route by which you entered?"
+
+"No," he said, marveling at the ton-weight copper cauldrons, one to each
+hole.
+
+"Even without rifles for the defense?"
+
+"No," he said.
+
+"And I have more than a thousand Mauser rifles here, and more than a
+million rounds of ammunition!"
+
+"How did you get them?"
+
+"I shall tell you that later. Come and see some other things. See and
+believe!"
+
+She showed him a cave in which boxes were stacked in high square piles.
+
+"Dynamite bombs!" she boasted. "How many boxes? I forget! Too many to
+count! Women brought them all the way from the sea, for even Muhammad
+Anim could not make Afridi riflemen carry loads. I have wondered what
+Bull-with-a-beard will say when he misses his precious dynamite!"
+
+"You've enough in there to blow the mountain up!" King advised her. "If
+somebody fired a pistol in here, the least would be the collapse of this
+floor into the tunnel below with a hundred thousand tons of rock on top
+of it. There is no other way out?"
+
+"Earth's Drink!" she said, and he made a grimace that set her to
+laughing.
+
+But she looked at him darkly after that and he got the impression that
+the thought was not new to her, and that she did not thank him for
+the advice. He began to wonder whether there was anything she had not
+thought of--any loophole she had left him for escape--any issue she had
+not foreseen.
+
+"Kill her!" a secret voice urged him. But that was the voice of the
+"Hills," that are violent first and regretful afterward. He did not
+listen to it. And then the wisdom of the West came to him, as epitomized
+by Cocker along the lines laid down by Solomon.
+
+"It isn't possible to make a puzzle that has no solution to it. The fact
+that it's a puzzle is the proof that there's a key! Go ahead!"
+
+It was the "Go ahead!" that Solomon omitted, and that makes Cocker such
+cheerful reading. King ceased conjecturing and gave full attention to
+his guide.
+
+She showed him where eleven hundred Mauser rifles stood in racks in
+another cave, with boxes of ammunition piled beside them--each rifle and
+cartridge worth its weight in silver coin--a very rajah's ransom!
+
+"The Germans are generous in some things--only in some things--very
+mean in others!" she told him. "They sent no medical stores, and no
+blankets!"
+
+Past caves where provisions of every imaginable kind were stored,
+sufficient for an army, she led him to where her guards slept together
+with the thirty special men whom King had brought with him up the
+Khyber.
+
+"I have five hundred others whom I dare trust to come in here," she
+said, "but they shall stay outside until I want them. A mystery is a
+good thing! It is good for them all to wonder what I keep in here! It is
+good to keep this sanctuary; it makes for power!"
+
+Pressing very close to him, she guided him down another dark tunnel
+until he and she stood together in the jaws of the round hole above the
+river, looking down into the cavern of Earth's Drink.
+
+Nobody looked up at them. The thousands were too busy working up a
+frenzy for the great jihad that was to come.
+
+Stacks of wood had been piled up, six-man high in the middle, and then
+fired. The heat came upward like a furnace blast, and the smoke was a
+great red cloud among the stalactites. Round and round that holocaust
+the thousands did their sword-dance, yelling as the devils yelled at
+Khinjan's birth. They needed no wine to craze them. They were drunk with
+fanaticism, frenzy, lust!
+
+"The women brought that wood from fifty miles away!" Yasmini shouted in
+his ear; for the din, mingling with the river's voice, made a volcano
+chord. "It is a week's supply of wood! But so they are--so they will be!
+They will lay waste India! They will butcher and plunder and burn! It
+will be what they leave of India that we shall build anew and govern,
+for India herself will rise to help them lay her own cities waste! It is
+always so! Conquests always are so! Come!"
+
+She tugged at him and led him back along the tunnel and through other
+tunnels to the throne room, where she made him sit at her feet again.
+
+The food had been cleared away in their absence. Instead, on the ebony
+table there were pens and ink and paper.
+
+She leaned back on her throne, with bare feet pressed tight against the
+footstool, staring, staring at the table and the pens, and then at
+King, as if she would compose an ultimatum to the world and send King to
+deliver it.
+
+"I said I will tell you," she sad slowly. "Listen!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIV
+
+
+
+     Nothing new! Nothing new!
+     Nowhere to hide when a reckoning's due,
+     But right earns right, and wrong gets rue,
+     With nothing deducted or given in lieu;
+     And neither the War God, I, nor you
+     Ever could make one lie come true!
+             Vale, Ceasar!
+
+
+As Yasmini herself had admitted, she headed from point to point after a
+manner of her own.
+
+"You know where is Dar es Salaam?" she asked.
+
+"East Africa," said King.
+
+"How far is that from here?"
+
+"Two or three thousand miles."
+
+"And English war-ships watch the Persian Gulf and all the seas from
+India to Aden?"
+
+King nodded.
+
+"Have the English any ships that dive under water?"
+
+He nodded again.
+
+"In these waters?"
+
+"I think not. I'm not sure, but I think not."
+
+"The grenades you have seen, and the rifles and cartridges were sent by
+the Germans to Dar es Salaam, to suppress a rising of African natives.
+Does it begin to grow clear to you, my friend?"
+
+He smiled as well as nodded this time.
+
+"Muhammad Anim used to wait with a hundred women at a certain place on
+the seashore. What he found on the beach there he made the women carry
+on their heads to Khinjan. And by the time he had hidden what he found
+and returned from Khinjan to the beach, there were more things to
+find and bring. So they worked, he and the Germans, for I know not how
+long--with the English watching the seas as on land lean wolves comb the
+valleys.
+
+"Did you ever hear of the big whale in the Gulf?"
+
+"No," said King. That was natural. There are as a rule about as many
+whales as salmon in the Persian Gulf.
+
+"A German who came to me in Delhi--he who first showed me pictures of
+an underwater ship--said that at that time the officers and crew of one
+such ship were getting great practise. Do you suppose their practise
+made whales take refuge in the Gulf?"
+
+"How should I know, Princess?"
+
+"Because I heard a story later, of an English cruiser on its way up
+the Gulf, that collided with a whale. The shock of hitting it bent many
+steel plates, and the cruiser had to put back for repair. It must have
+been a very big whale, for there was much oil on the sea for a long time
+afterward. So I heard.
+
+"And no more dynamite came--nor rifles--nor cartridges, although the
+Germans bad promised more. And orders for Muhammad Anim that had been
+said to come by sea came now by way of Bagdad, carried by pilgrims
+returning from the holy places. I know that because I intercepted a
+letter and threw its bearer into Earth's Drink to save Muhammad Anim the
+trouble of asking questions."
+
+"What were the terms of the German bargain?" King asked her. "What
+stipulations did they make?"
+
+"With the tribes? None! They were too wise. A jihad was decided on in
+Germany's good time; and when that time should come ten rifles in the
+'Hills' and a thousand cartridges would mean not only a hundred dead
+Englishmen, but ten times that number busily engaged. Why bargain when
+there was no need? A rifle is what it is. The 'Hills' are the 'Hills'!
+
+"Tell me about your lamp oil, then," he said. "You burn enough oil in
+Khinjan Caves to light Bombay! That does not come by submarine. The
+sirkar knows how much of everything goes up the Khyber. I have seen
+the printed lists myself--a few hundred cans of kerosene--a few score
+gallons of vegetable oil, and all bound for farther north. There isn't
+enough oil pressed among the 'Hills' to keep these caves going for a
+day. Where does it all come from?"
+
+She laughed, as a mother laughs at a child's questions, finding
+delicious enjoyment in instructing him.
+
+"There are three villages, not two days' march from Khabul, where men
+have lived for centuries by pressing oil for Khinjan Caves," she said.
+"The Sleeper fetched his oil thence. There are the bones of a camel in a
+cave I did not show you, and beside the camel are the leather bags still
+in which the oil was carried. Nowadays it comes in second-hand cans
+and drums. The Sleeper left gold in here. Those who kept the Sleeper's
+secret paid for the oil in gold. No Afghan troubled why oil was needed,
+so long as gold paid for it, until Abdurrahman heard the story. He made
+a ten-year-long effort to learn the secret, but he failed. When he cut
+off the supply of oil for a time, there was A rebellion so close to
+Khabul gates that he thought better of it. Of gold and Abdurrahman, gold
+was the stronger. And I know where the Sleeper dug his gold!"
+
+They sat in silence for a long while after that, she looking at the
+table, with its ink and pens and paper, and he thinking, with hands
+clasped round one knee; for it is wiser to think than to talk, even when
+a woman is near who can read thoughts that are not guarded.
+
+"Most disillusionments come simply," King said at last. "D'you know,
+Princess, what has kept the sirkar from really believing in Khinjan
+Caves?"
+
+She shook her head. "The gods!" she said. "The gods can blindfold
+governments and whole peoples as easily as they can make us see!"
+
+"It was the fact that they knew what provisions and what oil and what
+necessities of life went up the Khyber and came down it. They knew a
+place such as this was said to be could not be. They knew it! They could
+prove it!"
+
+Yasmini nodded.
+
+"Let it be a lesson to you, Princess!"
+
+She stared, and her fiery-opal eyes began to change and glow. She began
+to twist her golden hair round the dagger hilt again. But always
+her feet were still on the footstool of the throne, as if she
+knew--knew--knew that she stood on firm foundations. No sirkar ever
+doubted less than she, and the suggestions in King's little homily did
+not please her. She looked toward the table again--then again into his
+eyes.
+
+"Athelstan!" she said. "It sounds like a king's name! What was the
+Sleeper's name? I have often wondered! I found no name in all the books
+about Rome that seemed to fit him. None of the names I mouthed could
+make me dream as the sight of him could. But, Athelstan! That is a
+name like a king's! It seems to fit him, too! Was there such a name, in
+Rome?"
+
+"No," he said.
+
+"What does it mean?" she asked him.
+
+"Slow of resolution!"
+
+She clapped her hands.
+
+"Another sign!" she laughed. "The gods love me! There always is a
+sign when I need one! Slow of resolution, art thou? I will speed thy
+resolution, Well-beloved! You were quick to change from King, of the
+Khyber Rifle Regiment, to Kurram Khan. Change now into my warrior--my
+dear lord--my King again!"
+
+She rose, with arms outstretched to him. All her dancer's art, her
+untamed poetry, her witchery, were expressed in a movement. Her eyes
+melted as they met his. And since he stood up, too, for manner's sake,
+they were eye to eye again--almost lip to lip. Her sweet breath was in
+his nostrils.
+
+In another moment she was in his arms, clinging to him, kissing him. And
+if any man has felt on his lips the kiss of all the scented glamour of
+the East, let him tell what King's sensations were. Let Ceasar, who was
+kissed by Cleopatra, come to life and talk of it!
+
+King's arm is strong, and he did not stand like an idol. His head might
+swim, but she, too, tasted the delirium of human passion loosed and
+given for a mad swift minute. If his heart swelled to bursting, so must
+hers have done.
+
+"I have needed you!" she whispered. "I have been all alone! I have
+needed you!"
+
+Then her lips sought his again, and neither spoke.
+
+Neither knew how long it was before she began to understand that he, not
+she, was winning. The human answer to her appeal was full. He gave her
+all she asked of admiration, kiss for kiss. And then--her arms did not
+cling so tightly, although his strong right arm was like a stanchion.
+Because he knew that he, not she, was winning, he picked her up in his
+arms and kissed her as if she were a child. And then, because he knew he
+had won, he set her on her feet on the footstool of the throne, and even
+pitied her.
+
+She felt the pity. As she tossed the hair back over her shoulder her
+eyes glowed with another meaning--dangerous--like a tiger's glare.
+
+"You pity me? You think because I love you, you can feed my love on a
+plate to the Indian government? You think my love is a weapon to use
+against me? Your love for me may wait for a better time? You are not so
+wise as I thought you, Athelstan!"
+
+But he knew he had won. His heart was singing down inside him as it had
+not sung since he left India behind. But he stood quite humbly before
+her, for had he not kissed her?
+
+"You think a kiss is the bond between us? You mistake! You forget! The
+kiss, my Athelstan, was the fruit, not the seed! The seed came first! If
+I loosed you--if I set you free--you would never dare go back to India!"
+
+He scarcely heard her. He knew he had won. His heart was like a bird,
+fluttering wildly. He knew that the next step would be shown him, and
+for the present he had time and grace to pity her, knowing how he would
+have felt if she had won. Besides, he had kissed her, and he had not
+lied. Each kiss had been a tribute of admiration, for was she not
+splendid--amazing--more to be desired than wine? He stood with bowed
+head, lest the triumph in his eyes offend her. Yet if any one had asked
+him how he knew that he had won, he never could have told.
+
+"If you were to go back to India except as its conqueror, they would
+strip the buttons from your uniform and tear your medals off and shoot
+you in the back against a wall! My signature is known in India and I am
+known. What I write will be believed. Rewa Gunga shall take a letter.
+He shall take two--four--witnesses. He shall see them on their way and
+shall give them the letter when they reach the Khyber and shall send
+them into India with it. Have no fear. Bull-with-a-beard shall not
+intercept them, as I have intercepted his men. When Rewa Gunga shall
+return and tell me he saw my letter on its way down the Khyber, then we
+shall talk again about pity--you and I! Come!"
+
+She took his arm, as if her threats had been caresses. Triumph shone
+from her eyes. She tossed her brave chin and laughed at him, only
+encouraged to greater daring by his attitude.
+
+"Why don't you kill me?" she asked, and though his answer surprised her,
+it did not make her angry.
+
+"It would do no good," he said simply.
+
+"Would you kill me if you thought it would do good?"
+
+"Certainly!" he said.
+
+She laughed at that as if it were the greatest joke she had ever heard.
+It set her in the best humor possible, and by the time they reached the
+ebony table and she had taken the pen and dipped it in the ink, she was
+chuckling to herself as if the one good joke had grown into a hundred.
+
+She wrote in Urdu. It is likely that for all her knowledge of the spoken
+English tongue she was not so swift or ready with the trick of writing
+it. She had said herself that a babu read English books to her aloud.
+But she wrote in Urdu with an easy flowing hand, and in two minutes she
+had thrown sand on the letter and had given it to King to read. It was
+not like a woman's letter. It did not waste a word.
+
+        "Your Captain King has been too much trouble.  He has
+        taken money from the Germans.  He adopted native dress.
+        He called himself Kurram Khan.  He slew his own brother
+        at night in the Khyber Pass.  These men will say that
+        he carried the head to Khinjan, and their word is true,
+        for I, Yasmini, saw.  He used the head for a passport,
+        to obtain admittance.  He proclaims a jihad!  He urges
+        invasion of India!  He held up his brother's head
+        before five thousand men and boasted of the murder.
+        The next you shall hear of your Captain King of the
+        Khyber Rifles, he will be leading a jihad into India.
+        You would have better trusted me.  Yasmini."
+
+He read it and passed it back to her.
+
+"They will not disbelieve me," she said, triumphant as the very devil
+over a branded soul all hot. "They will be sure you are mad, and they
+will believe the witnesses!"
+
+He bowed. She sealed the letter and addressed it with only a scrawled
+mark on its outer cover. That, by the way, was utter insolence, for the
+mark would be understood at any frontier post by the officer commanding.
+
+"Rewa Gunga shall start with this to-day!" she said, with more amusement
+than malice. After that she was still for a moment, watching his eyes,
+at a loss to understand his carelessness. He seemed strangely unabased.
+His folded arms were not defiant, but neither were they yielding.
+
+"I love you, Athelstan!" she said. "Do you love me?"
+
+"I think you are very beautiful, Princess!"
+
+"Beautiful? I know I am beautiful. But is that all?"
+
+"Clever!" he added.
+
+She began to drum with the golden dagger hilt on the table, and to
+look dangerous, which is not to infer by any means that she looked less
+lovely.
+
+"Do you love me?" she asked.
+
+"Forgive me, Princess, but you forget. I was born east of Mecca, but my
+folk were from the West. We are slower to love than some other nations.
+With us love is more often growth, less often surrender at first sight.
+I think you are wonderful."
+
+She nodded and tucked the sealed letter in her bosom.
+
+"It shall go," she said darkly, "and another letter with it. They looted
+your brother's body. In his pocket they found the note you wrote him,
+and that you asked him to destroy! That will be evidence. That will
+convince! Come!"
+
+He followed her through leather curtains again and down the dark
+passage into the outer chamber; and the illusion was of walking behind a
+golden-haired Madonna to some shrine of Innocence. Her perfume was like
+incense; her manner perfect reverence. She passed into the cave where
+the two dead bodies lay like a high priestess performing a rite.
+
+Walking to the bed, she stood for minutes, gazing at the Sleeper and
+his queen. And from the new angle from which King saw him the Sleeper's
+likeness to himself was actually startling. Startling--weird--like an
+incantation were Yasmini's words when at last she spoke.
+
+"Muhammad lied! He lied in his teeth! His sons have multiplied his lie!
+Siddhattha, whom men have called Gotama, the Buddha, was before Muhammad
+and he knew more! He told of the wheel of things, and there is a wheel!
+Yet, what knew the Buddha of the wheel? He who spoke of Dharma (the
+customs of the law) not knowing Dharma! This is true---Of old there was
+a wish of the gods--of the old gods. And so these two were. There is a
+wish again now of the old gods. So, are we two not as they two were? It
+is the same wish, and lo! We are ready, this man and I. We will obey, ye
+gods--ye old gods!"
+
+She raised her arms and, going closer to the bed, stood there in an
+attitude of mystic reverence, giving and receiving blessings.
+
+"Dear gods!" she prayed. "Dear old gods--older than these 'Hills'--show
+me in a vision what their fault was--why these two were ended before the
+end!
+
+"I know all the other things ye have shown me. I know the world's silly
+creeds have made it mad, and it must rend itself, and this man and I
+shall reap where the nations sowed--if only we obey! Wherein, ye old
+dear gods, who love me, did these two disobey? I pray you, tell me in a
+vision!"
+
+She shook her head and sighed. Sadness seemed to have crept over her,
+like a cold mist from the night. It was as if she could dimly see her
+plans foredoomed, and yet hoped on in spite of it. The fatalism that she
+scorned as Muhammad's lie held her in its grip, and her natural courage
+fought with it. Womanlike, she turned to King in that minute and
+confided to him her very inmost thoughts. And he, without an inkling as
+to how she must fail, yet knew that she must, and pitied her.
+
+"Have you seen that breast under the armor?" she asked suddenly. "Come
+nearer! Come and look! Why did his breast decay and his body stay whole
+like hers? Did she kill him? Was that a dagger-stab in his breast? I
+found perfume in these caves--great jars of it, and I use it always.
+It is better than temple incense and all the breath of gardens in
+the spring! I have put it on slaughtered animals. Where the knife has
+touched them, they decay--as that man's breast did--but the rest of
+them remains undecaying year after year. It was a knife, I think, that
+pierced his breast. I think that scent is the preservative. Did she kill
+him? Was she jealous of him? How did she die? There is no mark on her!
+Athelstan--listen! I think he would have failed her! I think she stabbed
+him rather than see him fail, and then swallowed poison! Afterward their
+servants laid them there. She smiles in death because she knew the wheel
+will turn and that death dies too! He looks grim because he knew less
+than she. It is always woman who understands and man who fails! I think
+she stabbed him. She should have loved him better, and then there would
+have been no need. I will love you better than she loved him!"
+
+She turned and devoured him with her eyes, so that it needed all his
+manhood to hold him back from being her slave that minute. For in that
+minute she left no charm unexercised--sex--mesmerisrn--beauty--flattery
+(her eyes could flatter as a dumb dog's flatter a huntsman!)--grace
+unutterable-mystery--she used every art on him she knew. Yet he stood
+the test.
+
+"Even if you fail me, Well-beloved, I will love you! The gods who gave
+you to me will know how to make you love; and lessons are to learn. If
+you fail me I will forgive, knowing that in the end the gods will never
+let you fail me! You are mine, and Earth is ours, for the old gods
+intend it so!"
+
+She seemed to expect him to take her in his arms again; but he stood
+respectfully and made no answer, nor any move. Grim and strong his jowl
+was, like the Sleeper's, and the dark hair three days old on it softened
+nothing of its lines. His Roman nose and steady, dark, full eyes
+suggested no compromise. Yet he was good to look at. She had not lied
+when she said she loved him, and he understood her and was sorry. But he
+did not look sorry, nor did he offer any argument to quench her love. He
+was a servant of the raj; his life and his love had been India's
+since the day he first buckled on his spurs, and Yasmini wouldn't have
+understood that.
+
+Nor did she understand that, even supposing he had loved her with
+all his heart, not on any conditions would he have admitted it until
+absolutely free, any more than that if she crucified him he would love
+her the same, supposing that he loved her at all. Nor did she trust the
+"old gods" too well, or let them work unaided.
+
+"Come with me, Athelstan!" she said. She took his arm--found little
+jeweled slippers in a closet hewn in the wall--put them on and led him
+to the curtains he had entered by. She led him through them, and, red as
+cardinals in lamplight on the other side, they stood hand-in-hand, back
+to the leather, facing the unfathomable dark. Her fingers were so strong
+that he could not have wrenched his own away without using the other
+hand to help.
+
+"Where are your shoes?" she asked him.
+
+"At the foot of these steps, Princess."
+
+"Can you see them yonder in the dark?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Can you guess where the darkness leads to?"
+
+"No."
+
+He shuddered and she chuckled.
+
+"Could you return alone by the way Ismail brought you?"
+
+"I think not."
+
+"Will you try?"
+
+"If I must. I am not afraid."
+
+"You have heard the echo? Yes, I know you heard the echo. Hear it
+again!"
+
+She raised her head and howled like a wolf--like a lone wolf that has
+found no quarry--melancholy, mean, grown reckless with his hunger. There
+was a pause of nearly a minute. Then in the hideous darkness a phantom
+wolf-pack took up the howl in chorus, and for three long minutes there
+was din beside which the voice of living wolves at war would be a
+slumber song. Ten times ghastlier than if it had been real, the chorus
+wailed and ululated back and forth along immeasurable distances--became
+one yell again--and went howling down into earth's bowels as if the last
+of a phantom pack were left behind and yelling to be waited for.
+
+When it ceased at last King was sweating.
+
+"Nor am I afraid," she laughed, squeezing his hand yet tighter.
+
+She led him down the steps, and at the foot told him to put on his
+slippers, as if he were a child. Then, hurrying as if those opal eyes
+of hers were indifferent to dark or daylight, she picked her way among
+boulders that he could feel but not see, along a floor that was only
+smooth in places, for a distance that was long enough by two or three
+times to lose him altogether.
+
+When he looked back there was no sign of red lights behind him. And when
+he looked forward, there was a dim outer light in front and a whiff of
+the cool fresh air that presages the dawn!
+
+She led him through a gap on to a ledge of rock that hung thousands of
+feet above the home of thunder, a ledge less than six feet wide, less
+than twenty long, tilted back toward the cliff. There they sat, watching
+the stars. And there they saw the dawn come.
+
+Morning looks down into Khinjan hours after the sun has risen, because
+the precipices shut it out. But the peaks on every side are very beacons
+of the range at the earliest peep of dawn. In silence they watched day's
+herald touch the peaks with rosy jeweled fingers--she waiting as if she
+expected the marvel of it all to make King speak.
+
+It was cold. She came and snuggled close to him, and it was so they
+watched the sparkle of dawn's jewels die and the peaks grow gray again,
+she with an arm on his shoulder and strands of her golden hair blown
+past his face.
+
+"Of what are you thinking?" she asked him at last.
+
+"Of India, Princess."
+
+"What of India?"
+
+"She lies helpless."
+
+"Ah! You love India?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You shall love me better! You shall love me better than your life!
+Then, for love of me, you shall own the India you think you love! This
+letter shall go!" She tapped her bosom. "It is best to cut you off from
+India first. You shall lose that you may win!"
+
+She got up and stood in the gap, smiling mockingly, framed in the
+darkness of the cave behind.
+
+"I understand!" she said. "You think you are my enemy. Love and hate
+never lived side by side. You shall see!"
+
+Then in an instant she was gone, backward into the dark. He sat and
+waited for her, cross-legged on the ledge. As daylight began to filter
+downward he could dimly make out the waterfall, thundering like the
+whelming of a world; he sat staring at it, trying to formulate a plan,
+until it dawned on him that he was nearly chilled to the bone. Then he
+got up and stepped through the gap, too.
+
+"Princess!" he called. Then louder, "Princess!"
+
+When the echo of his own voice died, it was as if the ghoul who made the
+echoes had taken shape. A beard--red eye-rims--and a hook nose came out
+of the dark, and Ismail bared yellow teeth.
+
+"Come!" he said. "Come, little hakim!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XV
+
+
+
+     Private preserves?  New Notions?
+     Measure me a quart of honesty,
+     And I will trade it for a pound weight of my thoughts.
+     Then you and I shall go and dream together
+     A brand-new dream of things that never happened,
+     Nor ever can be.  Come, trade with me!
+
+
+What Yasmini had been doing in the minutes while King stared from the
+ledge in the dawn was unguessable. Perhaps she had been praying to
+her old gods. At least she had given Ismail strict orders, for he said
+nothing, but seized King's hand and led him through the dark as a rat
+leads a blind one--swiftly, surely, unhesitating. King had no means
+whatever of guessing their direction. They did not pass the two lights
+again with the curtain and the steps all glowing red.
+
+They came instead to other steps, narrow and steep, that led upward in a
+semicircle to a rough hole in a rock wall. At the top there was a little
+yellow light, so dim and small that its rays scarcely sufficed to show
+the opening.
+
+"Go up!" said Ismail, giving King a shove and disappearing at once. One
+side-step into blackness and he might have been a mile away.
+
+So King went up, stooping to feel each next footing with a cautious
+hand. He was beginning to be sleepy, and to suspect that Yasmini had
+taken him to view the dawn with just that end in view. Nothing can make
+tired eyes so long for sleep as a glimpse of waking day--Sleepy eyes are
+easiest to trick.
+
+It was not many minutes before he was sure his guess was right.
+
+The opening at the head of the stairs led into a tunnel. He followed
+it with a hand on either wall and reached another of Khinjan's strange
+leather curtains. His face struck the leather unexpectedly, and at that
+instant, as if his touch were electric, the curtain sprang aside and his
+eyes were dazzled by the light of diamonds.
+
+It was Aladdin's Cave, with her acting spirit of the lamp! It needed
+effort of self-control to know that the huge, white, cut crystals that
+sparkled all about the hewn cell could not be diamonds. They were as big
+as his head, and bigger--at least a hundred of them, and they multiplied
+the light of half a dozen little oil lamps until the cave seemed the
+home of light.
+
+Yasmini had not a jewel on her. She was in a new mood and new garments
+to suit it. Her feet were still bare, but she was robed from head to
+heel in pure white linen, on which her long hair shone as if it were
+truly strands of gold. She received him with an air of mystic calm,
+gracious and dignified as the high-priestess of a Grecian temple. She
+seemed devout--to have forgotten that she ever killed a man, or made a
+threat or plotted for a kingdom.
+
+"Be still," she said, raising a finger. "The old gods talk to us in
+here. It is not for us to answer them in words, but in deeds. Let us
+listen and do!"
+
+There were two cushions--great billowy modern ones, covered in gold
+brocade--on the floor in the midst of the cave. Between them was a stand
+of ivory, some two feet high, whose top was a disk, cut from the largest
+tusk that ever could have been. On the disk resting in a little hollow
+in the ivory, was a pure, perfect crystal sphere of a foot diameter.
+He could see his reflection in it, and Yasmini's, too, the moment he
+entered the cave, and whichever way they moved both images remained
+undistorted. He suspected that the lighting and the crystal reflectors
+had not been arranged at random.
+
+In each corner of the four-square cave there was a brazier of bronze,
+and from each rose incense smoke, straight upward. The four streams of
+smoke met at the ceiling and converged into a cloud that hung almost
+motionless.
+
+Yasmini stepped very reverently to a cushion by the crystal in the
+middle, and signed to King to imitate her. They stood facing. She seemed
+to pray, for her eyes were hidden under the long lashes. Then she knelt,
+and King did the same, his knees sinking deep into another cushion. So
+they knelt eye to eye above the crystal for many minutes without either
+saying a word. It was Yasmini who spoke first.
+
+"The old gods have showed me the past many and many a time in this," she
+said. "It is, their way of speaking to me. Now, to-day, I have prayed to
+them to show me the future. Look! Look, Athelstan! Do as I do--so!"
+
+There seemed nothing to be gained by disobeying her. To obey her might
+be to win new insight into the ramifications of her plans. Men who have
+experience of the East are the last to deny that there is method in
+Eastern magic; they glimpse the knowledge that belonged to Pharaoh's
+men, although unlike Moses they are not always able to confound it. The
+East forgets nothing. The West ignores. But there are men from the West
+who are willing to look and to listen and to try to understand; like
+King, they go high in the Service. There are others who look on at the
+magic with an understanding eye and are caught by it. Their end is not
+good to contemplate. The East is fettered in her own mesmeric spell and
+must suffer until she wakes.
+
+Yasmini held the upright column of the ivory stand with both hands,
+close under the disk at the top. He copied her, placing his hands below
+hers. Hers slipped down and covered his, soft and warm; and so they
+stayed.
+
+"Look!" she said. "Look!"
+
+Her own eyes were grown big and round, and she gazed at the crystal ball
+as she had looked into King's eyes that night, with the very hunger of
+her soul. Her lips were parted. Watching her, King grew expectant, too.
+His eyes followed hers, to stare into the middle of the crystal, no
+longer feeling sleepy, and in less than a minute he could not have
+withdrawn them had he tried.
+
+The crystal clouded over. Yasmini's breath came steadily, with a little
+hissing sound between her teeth, and the crystal, or else the whole
+world, seemed to sway in time to it. Then the man in Roman armor strode
+out of a mist, and all was steady again and easy to understand. When the
+man in armor opened his lips to speak, one knew what he had said. When
+be frowned, one knew why he frowned. When he smiled, one knew that she
+was coming.
+
+And she did come, dancing out of the mist behind him, to fling soft arms
+round his neck and whisper praises in his ear. He stood like a king who
+has come into his own, with an arm round her and his chin held high. She
+kissed him on his proud chin, and laughed into his face.
+
+There were troubles--difficulties, all in the mist behind, but he stood
+and despised them then while she caressed him!
+
+Just as spoken words had no part in the vision, yet the whole was
+understood, so time did not enter into it. There was no connecting link
+between each scene; each dissolved into the other, and all were one.
+
+She faded into mist, in a swirl of graceful drapery, and he frowned
+again. A long line of men-at-arms stood before him, grim as he and as
+discontented. They leaned on spears, at ease, and that seemed to annoy
+him most of all. A spokesman stood out from the ranks and addressed him,
+with gesticulations and a head so far thrown back that his helmet-plume
+stood out like a secretary's pen behind him. He was not a Roman,
+although there was something Roman about his attitude and armor. None of
+the men-at-arms was a Roman.
+
+They demanded to be led home, wherever home was. (It was as plain as if
+their spokesman had shouted it into King's ear aloud.) And he refused
+them bluntly, proudly.
+
+Two men brought him a native woman, each holding an arm and thrusting
+her forward between them. She was not at all unlike a native woman of
+to-day, either in dress or sullenness; she had the beak and the keen
+eyes and the cruel lips of the "Hills." They showed her to him, and it
+was quite clear that they compared her to their own women, left behind;
+the comparison was plainly to her disadvantage.
+
+He wasted no argument on them, but his scorn made the two men fade away,
+and the woman with them. Yet he had no scorn for his lined-up fighting
+men, and so could act none. He ordered the spokesman back to the ranks,
+and the man obeyed. He gave another order, and the long lines stood at
+attention, spears straight up and down, and their round sheilds like
+great medallions on a wall. He ordered them away, but they stood still.
+
+Then he did a truly Roman thing. He got his harness off--unbuckled and
+took off the great bronze corselet, in which he lay dead in another
+cave. He threw it down--tore open the white shirt underneath--and held
+his arms out. He bade them come and kill him. He bade them drive their
+spears into his unprotected breast.
+
+There was not a movement down the line of men. They stood
+as a cliff looks at the tide. He dared them. He called them
+cowards--women--weaklings afraid of blood. But they stood still. He
+strode up and down the line, seeking a man with heart enough to plunge a
+spear into him, and no man moved.
+
+Then he stood still before them all again and wept, because they loved
+him and he loved them. And then she came, not dancing this time, but
+barefooted and walking like a poem of the early days of Greece. She
+picked up his corselet and buckled it on him, making him hold up
+his arms and kneel while she slipped it over his head. And the grim
+men-at-arms hove their long spears up into the air and roared her an
+ovation, bringing down their right feet with a thunder all together.
+
+"Ave!"
+
+But the mist closed up and then the crystal was clear again. It was
+Yasmini's voice that spoke, King looked up into her eyes, and they
+made him shudder, for he had never seen eyes like them. Her hands still
+clasped his own, burning hot. She was more terrible than Khinjan.
+
+"I never saw that before," she said. "It is because you are here! We
+shall see it all now! We shall know it all! We shall know whether it
+was she who killed him, or whether his own men took him at his word. We
+shall know! Look again! Look again!"
+
+His eyes seemed unable to obey his own will any longer. They obeyed
+her voice. He gazed again into the crystal, and it clouded over. But
+although he obeyed her, the crystal obeyed him and answered at least in
+part the questions his imagination asked. He was not conscious of asking
+anything, but being a soldier his curiosity followed a more or less
+definite line.
+
+Yasmini's breath began to come and go again with the little hissing
+sound. Her hot hands pressed his own. The mist suddenly dissolved. There
+was a road--a long white road, across a plain, and the men-at-arms
+fought their way along it. They were facing east.
+
+Archers opposed them--archers on foot, and cavalry--Parthians. The
+Parthians were wild, but the drill of the men-at-arms was a thing to
+marvel at. When the flights of arrows came they knelt behind their
+shields. When the horsemen charged they closed in solid phalanx, and
+the inner ranks hurled javelins at ten-yard range. When the fury of the
+onslaught died they formed in column and went forward, gaining furlongs
+at a time while their enemy watched them and wondered.
+
+It was plain that the enemy expected them to retreat sooner or later,
+for the archers and cavalry were at great pains to get behind them, so
+that before long the road ahead was less well defended than that behind.
+It did not seem to occur to the enemy that they were pressing toward the
+distant line of hills and did not seek to return at all.
+
+They had no baggage to impede them. It was absurd to suppose they would
+not try to fight a way back soon. They must be a Roman raiding party,
+out to teach Parthians a lesson. Yet they pressed ever forward, and the
+hills grew ever nearer; while he sat a great brown charger calmly in
+their midst and gave them not too many orders, but here and there a word
+of praise, and once or twice a trumpet shout of encouragement. He seemed
+to own the knack of being wherever the fight was fiercest. His mere
+presence seemed better than a hundred men when the phalanx bent before
+charging cavalry.
+
+She rode a little white horse, beside him always and utterly scornful
+of the risk. She wore no armor--carried no shield. Her bare feet showed
+through the sandal straps, and the outlines of her lissom body were
+quite visible through the muslin stuff she wore. She might have just
+come from the dancing. She had a flower in her hand, and a wreath of
+flowers in her hair. She shouted more encouragement than he. She shouted
+too much. Once he laid a strong brown hand across her mouth, and she
+held it there and kissed it.
+
+They lost men--five or six or ten or twenty at each onslaught. Perhaps
+they had been a thousand strong in the beginning. Their own men--the
+regimental surgeons probably--cut the throats of the badly wounded, to
+save them from the enemy's attentions; and by this time they were not
+more than seven or eight hundred strong.
+
+But they went forward--ever forward--and the line of hills drew near.
+Then he began to stir himself, and she with him. He shouted to them to
+charge, and she echoed him, leaving his side at last to take command
+of a wing and sting the tired-out men-at-arms into new enthusiasm. In
+a minute they were a roaring tide that swept forward to the foot of the
+hills and surged upward without a check. In a little while they were
+hurling boulders down on an enemy that seemed inclined to parley.
+
+Then, like a shadow of the incense cloud above, the mist closed up in
+the crystal again, and in a moment more King and Yasmini were looking
+into each other's eyes again above it.
+
+"I have seen that before," she said, shaking her, head. "I am weary of
+their battles. They won; that is enough! I must know how they failed, so
+that we make no such mistakes!"
+
+Her face was flushed, and her eyes glowed with the fire that is not lit
+by ordinary passion. She was being eaten by ambition--burned by her own
+fire--by ambition not totally selfish, for she yearned to shepherd King
+as she seemed to think this woman of the vision had not shepherded the
+man in armor.
+
+"Look again!" she said. "Look again! And oh, ye old gods, show--show me
+wherein she failed!"
+
+They stared again, and once more the crystal clouded. Out of the cloud
+came a city in the middle of a plain, and the city was besieged. It was
+not a very great city, but from the outside it looked rich, for domes
+and roofs and towers showed above the wall, all well built and well
+preserved. He and she, sitting their horses out of arrow range from the
+main gate seemed confident of taking it and eager to get it over with.
+
+They no longer had only six or seven hundred men, but men by the
+thousand. Their veterans in Roman armor were in command of others now,
+and they had a human pack-train with them, heavily burdened captives who
+sulked in chains under a guard.
+
+The mist cleared further, and the gate gave in under the blows of an
+improvised battering-ram, covered by showers of arrows from short
+range. Then, like a river breaking down a dam, the thousands stormed in,
+howling. Smoke rose. There were screams of women. A great tower near the
+gate, that was half wood, half stone, crackled and curled up in yellow
+and crimson flame. He and she rode in together as modern men and women
+ride through a gate to the covert side at a fox-hunt. They chatted and
+laughed together, and their horses pranced, responding to the humor of
+their riders.
+
+King would have liked to tear his eyes away from the scenes that
+followed in the tree-lined streets, but the crystal ball held him as
+if in a trance--that and Yasmini's hands that clasped his own like hot
+torture chamber clamps. Animals fighting to the death are not so vile,
+nor so inhuman as men can be in the hour of what they call victory. Even
+the little children of that city paid the penalty for having closed the
+gate.
+
+Time was no measure to the crystal ball. In minutes it showed the
+devil's work of hours. The city went up in smoke and flame, and from
+the far side through a great breach in the wall the conquerors went
+out, with their plunder and such prisoners as had been saved to drag and
+carry it.
+
+Now there were wagons and camels and horses. Now there were tents and
+furniture. Now each man of the fighting force had as much as he himself
+could carry, as well as what was loaded on the prisoners.
+
+Only he and she seemed to care nothing for the loot and rode as if each
+was all the other needed. Still he wore nothing but his armor, and
+she no more than her dancing dress and sandals. But now she had eight
+prisoners to hold a panoply above her horse and keep the sun from her.
+
+She had flowers woven in her hair, and others in her hand, as if she
+rode from a bridal feast and were not in mourning for a plundered,
+butchered city. They were headed northward now, toward distant
+mountains, and the dust of their long column went up like a river of
+smoke, flowing from the holocaust behind.
+
+Yasmini shook her head impatiently. The crystal clouded over, and King's
+eyes were free.
+
+"I am tired of it," she said. "I have seen that so many times. I know
+they won. I know they found their way to Khinjan. I know they began to
+build an empire here. I have seen all that a hundred times. What I must
+know is what mistake they made. What did they do wrong? How did they
+come to fail? Look again! Let us look again!"
+
+She never once let King's hands go, but pressed them tighter and
+tighter until the circulation nearly stopped and they grew numb. Her own
+strength seemed endless--to grow rather than to wane in proportion as
+her yearning to look into the past grew. Her attitude would have
+been more understandable if she had believed herself and King to be
+reincarnations of those forgotten conquerors; but she was too original
+for that. She had said the old gods wished, and the man and the woman
+were; the old gods wished the same wish again, and she and King were.
+Why then, if the old gods were contriving it all, should she seek to
+steady the ark for them? But down at bottom there is no logic connected
+with gods many. She clutched King's fingers as if to hold him there, and
+to make him see and understand the distant past, were the only way to
+save him from mistakes.
+
+"Look!" she insisted. "Look again!" And he obeyed her. By this time
+obedience was much the easiest course. Between times his eyes were so
+weary he could hardly hold them open, and it was only when he gazed into
+the crystal that he could rest them and feel easy. He knew well that
+she was winning control over him in some sort, and he fought against it
+grimly. Soon he became weirdly conscious of being two men--one, whom she
+had grasped and overcome, a physical man who did not matter much, and
+another, mental man who was free from her, who could understand her,
+whom she could not reach or touch.
+
+"Look!" she insisted. "Look!" And the crystal clouded over.
+
+He strode out of the mist again, frowning, with his chin hung low and
+fists clenched tight at his sides. Four of his own men came out of the
+mist to him and greeted him respectfully, yet not without a touch of
+irony.
+
+They spoke to him and pointed westward. One laid a hand on his shoulder,
+but he shook it off and the man reeled back as if he had been struck.
+Another man took up the argument, but he shook his head. They all spoke
+together, gesticulating and growing angry; but he stood calm among them,
+as a rock stands in a storm. He folded his arms across his breast after
+a while and listened, saying nothing.
+
+Then as if to end the argument for good and all, he drew his sword and
+held it out toward them, hilt first, telling them again to kill him
+and have done with it. They refused. He laughed at them, but they still
+refused; so he put his sword back in the sheath.
+
+One of the men stepped into the mist and disappeared. Presently he
+came again, with two others, helping a wounded man along between them.
+Whoever the wounded man might be he was treated with respect. Prouder
+than Lucifer, he who had struck another man's hand from off his shoulder
+knelt to give this wounded man a knee and seemed pained when the man
+refused him.
+
+The wounded man pointed to the westward too and argued in short
+clipped-off sentences. He had a day or two to live--certainly not
+longer, for the blood flowed slowly from a wound that would not stanch;
+yet he argued as a man who has lost no interest in life, but rather sees
+its problems truly now that his own are near an end.
+
+He demanded something almost truculently. He took his helmet off and
+passed it down to him. With fingers that were growing feeble the wounded
+man held it and traced out the letters S. P. Q. R. on the front.
+
+"Go home!" he said, passing it back to him. "Fight your way back home!"
+What he said was as distinct as if a voice in the cave had spoken it.
+
+Then, vision within a vision--dream within a dream--there was a view of
+the Via Appia, with gaunt grim gallows set along it in a row and on them
+a regiment's commander crucified along with the remnant of his men.
+
+"So Rome treats traitors!" said a voice, that might have been either
+man's.
+
+But instantly there was another vision, of ten thousand wolves baying
+down a Himalayan gorge in winter-time, the sleet frozen stiff on their
+fur and their tongues hanging. Eye and fang flashed altogether and made
+one gleam.
+
+"Choose!" said a voice.
+
+So he chose. He nodded. The men saluted him, and the wounded man was
+helped away to die. And then she came, angry as a flash of lightning, to
+spring at him and cling to him and call him names--begging, demanding,
+ordering, crying--abusing him and praising him in turn. He shook his
+head. She sobbed, but he shook his head again and pointed westward.
+Then she took him by the hand and led him away, not looking at his face
+again.
+
+The crystal ball grew clouded. Yasmini's breath came and went as if she
+were running in a race, and her pressure on King's fingers was actually
+painful. The mist dissolved, and King forgot the pressure--forgot
+everything. The man in armor lay dead on his back in the cave on the
+wooden bed, and she bent over him, dagger in hand.
+
+"Ah!" said Yasmini, her teeth chattering. "But what else could she do?"
+The mist closed in again and the crystal grew opaque. "The future!" she
+begged. "It is the future I must know! Ye old gods, tell me! Show me!"
+
+The mist turned red. The crystal ball became as it were a ball of fire
+revolving within itself. The fire turned to blood, and the blood to
+fire again. The very cavern that they knelt in seemed to sway. Yasmini
+screamed and moaned. She loosed King's hands to cover her own eyes.
+
+And as she did that King sank, like a sack half-empty and toppled over
+sidewise on the floor asleep.
+
+He neither dreamed nor was conscious of anything, but slept like a dead
+man, having fought against her mesmerism harder than he knew.
+
+Statesmen, generals, outlaws, all make their big mistakes and manage to
+recover. Very nearly always it is an apparently little mistake that does
+most damage in the end, something unnoticeable at the time, that grows
+in geometrical proportion, minus instead of plus.
+
+Yasmini made her little mistake that minute in believing King was
+utterly mesmerized at last and utterly in her power. Whereas in truth he
+was only weary. It may be that she gave him orders in his sleep, after
+the accepted manner of mesmerists; but if she did, they never reached
+him; he was far too fast asleep. He slept so deep and long that he was
+not conscious of men's voices, nor of being carried, nor of time, nor of
+anxiety, nor of anything.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI
+
+
+
+     Wolf met wolf in the dawning day
+     Where scent hung sweet over trodden clay,
+     And square each stood in the jungle way
+     Eyeing the other with ears laid back.
+     Still were the watchers.  When foe greets foe
+     The wisest are quietest.  Better to go--
+     Who stays to watch trouble woos trouble!
+             But lo!
+     They trotted together to hunt one doe,
+     Eyeing each other with ears laid back.
+
+
+When King awoke he lay on a comfortable bed in a cave he had never yet
+seen, but there was no trace of Yasmini, nor of the men who must have
+carried him to it. Barbaric splendor and splendor that was not by any
+means barbaric lay all about--tiger skins, ivory-legged chairs, graven
+bronze vases, and a yak-hair shawl worth a rajah's ransom.
+
+The cave was spacious and not gloomy, for there was a wide door,
+apparently unguarded, and another square opening cut in the rock to
+serve as a window. Through both openings light streamed in like taut
+threads of Yasmini's golden hair--strings of a golden zither, on which
+his own heart's promptings played a tune.
+
+He had no idea how long he had slept, but judged from memory of his
+former need of sleep and recogntion of his present freshness--and from
+the fact that it was a morning sun that shone through the openings--that
+he must have slept the clock round.
+
+It did not matter. He knew it did not matter in the least. He had
+no more plan than a mathematician has who starts to solve a problem,
+knowing that twice two is four in infinite combination. Like the
+mathematician, he knew that he must win.
+
+No man ever won a battle or conceived a stroke of statesmanship, no
+great deed was ever accomplished without a first taste of the triumphant
+foreknowledge, such as comes only to men who have digged hard, hewing to
+the line, loyal to first principles. King had been loyal all his life.
+
+The difference between first principles and the other thing could hardly
+be better illustrated than by comparing Yasmini's position with his.
+From her point of view he had no ground to stand on, unless he should
+choose to come and stand on hers. She had men, ammunition, information.
+He had what he stood in, and his only information had been poured into
+his ears for her ends.
+
+Yet his heart sang inside him now; and he trusted it because that
+singing never had deceived him. He did not believe she would have left
+him alone at that state of affairs unless through over-confidence. It
+is one of the absolute laws that over-confidence begets blindness and
+mistakes.
+
+She had staked on what seemed to her the certainty of India's rising
+at the first signal of a holy war. She believed from close acquaintance
+that India was utterly disloyal, having made a study of disloyalty. And
+having read history she knew that many a conqueror has staked on such
+cards as hers, to win for lack of a better man to take the other side.
+
+But King had studied loyalty all his life, and he knew that besides
+being the home of money-lenders, thugs, and murderers, India is the very
+motherland of chivalry; that besides sedition she breeds gentlemen with
+stout hearts; that in addition to what one Christian Book calls "whoring
+after strange gods" India strives after purity. He knew that India's
+ideals are all imperishable, and her crimes but a kaleidoscopic phase.
+
+Not that he was analyzing thoughts just then. He was listening to the
+still small voice that told him half of his purpose was accomplished.
+He had probed Khinjan Caves, and knew the whole purpose for which the
+lawless thousands had been gathering and were gathering still. Remained,
+to thwart that purpose. And he had no more doubt of there being a means
+to thwart it than a mathematician has of the result of two times two,
+applied.
+
+Like a mathematician, he did not waste time and confuse issues by
+casting too far ahead, but began to devote himself steadily to the
+figures nearest. Knots are not untied by wholesale, but are conquered
+strand by strand. He began at the beginning, where he stood.
+
+He became conscious of human life near by and tip-toed to the door to
+look. A six-foot ledge of smooth rock ended just at the door and sloped
+in the other direction sharply downward toward another opening in the
+cliff side, three or four hundred yards away and two hundred feet lower
+down.
+
+Behind him in a corner at the back of the cave was a narrow fissure,
+hung with a leather curtain, that was doubtless the door into Khinjan's
+heart; but the only way to the outer air was along that ledge above a
+dizzying precipice, so high that the huge waterfall looked like a little
+stream below. He was in a very eagle's aerie; the upper rim of Khinian's
+gorge seemed not more than a quarter of a mile above him.
+
+Round the corner, ten feet from the entrance, stood a guard, armed to
+the teeth, with a rifle, a sword, two pistols and a long curved Khyber
+knife stuck handy in his girdle. He spoke to the man and received no
+answer. He picked up a splinter of rock and threw it. The fellow looked
+at him then. He spoke again. The man transferred his rifle to the other
+hand and made signs with his free fingers. King looked puzzled. The man
+opened his mouth and showed that his tongue was missing. He had been
+made dumb, as pegs are made to fit square holes. King went in again, to
+wait on events and shudder.
+
+Nor did he have long to wait. There came a sound of grunting, up the
+rock path. Then footsteps. Then a hoarse voice, growling orders. He went
+out again to look, and beheld a little procession of women, led by
+a man. The man was armed, but the women were burdened with his own
+belongings--the medicine chest--his saddle and bridle--his unrifled
+mule-pack--and, wonder of wonders! the presents Khinjan's sick had given
+him, including money and weapons. They came past the dumb man on guard
+and laid them all at King's feet just inside the cave.
+
+He smiled, with that genial, face-transforming smile of his that has so
+often melted a road for him through sullen crowds. But the man in charge
+of the women did not grin. He was suffering. He growled at the women,
+and they went away like obedient animals, to sit half-way down the ledge
+and await further orders. He himself made as if to follow them, and the
+dumb man on guard did not pay much attention; he let women and man pass
+behind him, stepping one pace forward toward the edge to make more room.
+That was his last entirely voluntary act in this world.
+
+With a suddenness that disarmed all opposition the other humped himself
+against the wall and bucked into the dumb man's back, sending him,
+weapons and all, hurtling over the precipice. With a wild effort to
+recover, and avenge himself, and do his duty, the victim fired his
+rifle, that was ready cocked. The bullet struck the rock above and
+either split or shook a great fragment loose, that hurtled down after
+him, so that he and the stone made a race of it for the waterfall and
+the caverns into which the water tumbled thousands of feet away. The
+other ruffian spat after him, and then walked back to where King stood.
+
+"Now heal me my boils!" he said, grinning at last, doubtless from
+pleasure at the prospect. He was the same man who had stood on guard at
+the "guest-cave" when Ismail led King out to see the Cavern of Earth's
+Drink.
+
+The temptation was to fling the brute after his victim. The temptation
+always is to do the wrong thing--to cap wrath with wrath, injustice with
+vengeance. That way wars begin and are never ended. King beckoned
+him into the cave, and bent over the chest of medical supplies. Then,
+finding the light better for his purpose at the entrance, he called the
+man back and made him sit down on the box.
+
+The business of lancing boils is not especially edifying in itself; but
+that particular minor operation probably saved India. But for hope of
+it the man with boils would never have stood two turns on guard hand
+running and let the relief sleep on; so he would not have been on duty
+when the message came to carry King's belongings to his new cave of
+residence. There would have been no object in killing the dumb man and
+so there would have been an expert with a loaded rifle to keep Muhammad
+Anim lurking down the trail.
+
+Muhammad Anim came--like the devil to scotch King's faith. He had
+followed the women with the loads. He stood now, like a big bear on a
+mountain track, swaying his head from side to side six feet away from
+King, watching the boils succumb to treatment. He grunted when the job
+was finished, and King jumped, nearly driving the lance into a new place
+in his patient's neck.
+
+"Let him go!" growled Muhammad Anim. "Go thou! Stand guard over the
+women until I come!"
+
+The mullah turned a rifle this way and that in his paws, like a great
+bear dancing. The Mahsudi with a sore neck could have shot him perhaps,
+but there are men with whom only the bravest dare try conclusions. In
+cold gray dawn it would have needed a martinet to make a firing squad
+do execution on Muhammad Anim, even with his hands tied and his back
+against a wall. A man whose boils had just been lanced was no match for
+him at all, even in broad daylight. The Hillman slunk away and did as he
+was told.
+
+"What meant thy message?" growled the mullah. "There came a Pathan to me
+in the Cavern of Earth's Drink with word that yonder sits a hakim. What
+of it?"
+
+King had almost forgotten the message he had sent to Muhammad Anim in
+the Cavern of Earth's Drink. But that was not why his eyes looked past
+the mullah's now, nor why he did not answer. The mullah did not look
+round, for he knew what was happening.
+
+The very Orakzai Pathan who had sat next King in the Cavern of Earth's
+Drink, and who had carried the message for him, was creeping up behind
+the women and already had his rifle leveled at the man with boils.
+
+"Aye!" said the mullah, watching King's eyes. "He has done well, and the
+road is clear!"
+
+The man with boils offered no fight. He dropped his rifle and threw his
+hands up. In a moment the Orakzai Pathan was in command of two rifles,
+holding them in one hand and nodding and making signs to King from
+among the women, whom he seemed to regard as his plunder too. The women
+appeared supremely indifferent in any event. King nodded back to him.
+A friend is a friend in the "Hills," and rare is the man who spares his
+enemy.
+
+"Why send that message to me?" asked Muhammad Anim.
+
+"Why not?" asked King. "If none know where the hakim is, how shall the
+hakim earn a living?"
+
+"None comes to earn a living in the Hills," growled the mullah, swaying
+his head slowly and devouring King with cruel calculating eyes. "Why art
+thou here?"
+
+"I slew a man," said King.
+
+"Thou liest! It was my men who got the head that let thee in! Speak! Why
+art thou here?"
+
+But King did not answer. The mullah resumed.
+
+"He who brought me the message yesterday says he has it from another,
+who had it from a third, that thou art here because she plans a
+simultaneous rising in India, and thou art from the Punjab where the
+Sikhs all wait to rise. Is that true?"
+
+"Thy man said it," answered King.
+
+"What sayest thou?" the mullah asked.
+
+"I say nothing," said King.
+
+"Then hear me!" said the mullah. "Listen, thou." But he did not begin
+to speak yet. He tried to see past King into the cave and to peer about
+into the shadows.
+
+"Where is she?" he asked. "Her man Rewa Gunga went yesterday, with three
+men and a letter to carry, down the Khyber. But where is she?"
+
+So he had slept the clock round! King did not answer. He blocked the way
+into the cave and looked past the mullah at a sight that fascinated, as
+a serpent's eyes are said to fascinate a bird. But the mullah, who knew
+perfectly well what must be happening, did not trouble to turn his head.
+
+The Orakzai Pathan crouched among the women, and the women grinned. The
+Mahsudi, having surrendered and considering himself therefore absolved
+from further responsibility at least for the present, spat over the
+precipice and fingered gingerly the sore place where his boils had been.
+He yawned and dropped both hands to his side; and it was at that instant
+that the Pathan sprang at him.
+
+With arms like the jaws of a vise he pinned the Mahsudi's to his side,
+and lifted him from off his feet. The fellow screamed, and the Pathan
+shouted "Ho!" But he did no murder yet. He let his victim grow fully
+conscious of the fate in store for him, holding him so that his frantic
+kicks were squandered on thin air. He turned him slowly, until he was
+upside-down; and so, perpendicular, face-outward, he hove him forward
+like a dead log. He stood and watched his victim fall two or three
+thousand feet before troubling to turn and resume both rifles; and it
+was not until then, as if he had been mentally conscious of each move,
+that the mullah turned to look, and seeing only one man nodded.
+
+"Good!" he grunted. "'Shabash!"' (Well done!)
+
+Then he turned his head to stare into King's face, with the scrutiny of
+a trader appraising loot. Fire leaped up behind his calculating eyes.
+And without a word passing between them, King knew that this man as well
+as Yasmini was in possession of the secret of the Sleeper. Perhaps he
+knew it first; perhaps she snatched the keeping of the secret from him.
+At all events he knew it and recognized King's likeness to the Sleeper,
+for his eyes betrayed him. He began to stroke his beard monotonously
+with one hand. The rifle, that he pretended to be holding, really leaned
+against his back and with the free hand he was making signals.
+
+King knew well he was making signals. But he knew too that in Yasmini's
+power, her prisoner, he had no chance at all of interfering with her
+plans. Having grounded on the bottom of impotence, so to speak, any tide
+that would take him off must be a good tide. He pretended to be aware of
+nothing, and to be particularly unaware that the Pathan, with a rifle in
+each hand, was pretending to come casually up the path.
+
+In a minute he was covered by a rifle. In another minute the mullah had
+lashed his hands. In five minutes more the women were loaded again with
+his belongings and they were all half-way down the track in single file,
+the mullah bringing up the rear, descending backward with rifle ready
+against surprise, as if he expected Yasmini and her men to pounce out
+any minute to the rescue.
+
+They entered a tunnel and wound along it, stepping at short intervals
+over the bodies of three stabbed sentries. The Pathan spurned them with
+his heel as he passed. In the glare at the tunnel's mouth King tripped
+over the body of a fourth man and fell with his chin beyond the edge of
+a sheer precipice.
+
+They were on a ledge above the waterfall again, having come through
+a projection on the cliff's side, for Khinjan is all rat-runs and
+projections, like a sponge or a hornet's nest on a titanic scale.
+
+The Pathan laughed and came back to gather him like a sheaf of corn. The
+great smelly ruffian hugged him to himself as he set him on his feet.
+
+"Ah! Thou hakim!" he grinned. "There is no pain in my shoulder at all!
+Ask of me another favor when the time comes! Hey, but I am sick of
+Khinjan!"
+
+He gave King a shove along the path in the general direction of the
+mullah. Then he seized the dead body by the legs, and hurled it like a
+sling shot, watching it with a grin as it fell in a wide parabola. After
+that he took the dead man's rifle, and those of the three other dead
+men, that he had hidden in a crevice in the rock, and loaded them all on
+a woman in addition to King's saddle that she carried already.
+
+"Come!" he said. "Hurry, or Bull-with-a-beard yonder will remember us
+again. I love him best when he forgets!"
+
+They soon reached another cave, at which the mullah stopped. It was a
+dark ill-smelling hole, but he ordered King into it and the Pathan after
+him on guard, after first seeing the women pile all their loads
+inside. Then he took the women away and went off muttering to himself,
+swaggering, swinging his right arm as he strode, in a way few natives
+do.
+
+"Let us hope he has forgotten these!" the Pathan grinned, touching the
+pile of rifles. "Weight for weight in silver they will bring me a fine
+price! He may forget. He dreams. For a mullah he cares less for meat and
+money than any I ever saw. He is mad, I think. It is my opinion Allah
+touched him!"
+
+"What is that, under thy shirt?" King asked.
+
+The Pathan grinned, and undid the button. There was a second shirt
+underneath, and to that on the left breast were pinned two British
+medals.
+
+"Oh, yes!" he laughed. "I served the raj! I was in the army eleven
+years."
+
+"Why did you leave it?" King asked, remembering that this man loved to
+hear his own voice.
+
+"Oh, I had furlough, and the bastard who stood next me in the ranks was
+the son of a dog with whom my father had a blood-feud. The blind fool
+did not know me. He received his furlough on the same day as I. I would
+not lay finger on him that side of the border, for we ate the same salt.
+I knifed him this side the border. It was no affair, of the British. But
+I was seen, and I fled. And having slain a man, and having no doubt a
+report had gone back to the regiment, I entered this place. Except for a
+raid now and then to cool my blood I have been here ever since. It is a
+devil of a place."
+
+Now the art of ruling India consists not in treading barefooted on
+scorpions--not in virtuous indignation at men who know no better--but in
+seeking for and making much of the gold that lies ever amid the dross.
+There is gold in the character of any man who once passed the grilling
+tests before enlistment in a British-Indian regiment. It may need
+experience to lay a finger on it, but it is surely there.
+
+"I heard," said King, "as I came toward the Khyber in great haste (for
+the police were at my heels)--"
+
+"Ah, the police!" the Pathan grinned pleasantly.
+
+The inference was that at some time or other he had left his mark on the
+police.
+
+"I heard," said King, "that men are flocking back to their old
+regiments."
+
+"Aye, but not men with a price on their heads, little hakim!"
+
+"I could not say," said King. To seem to know too much is as bad as to
+drink too much. "But I heard say that the sirkar has offered pardons to
+all deserters who return."
+
+"Hah! The sirkar must be afraid. The sirkar needs men!"
+
+"For myself," said King, "a whole skin in the 'Hills' seems better than
+one full of bullet holes in India."
+
+"Hah! But thou art a hakim, not a soldier!"
+
+"True!" said King.
+
+"Tell me that again! Free pardons? Free pardons for all deserters?"
+
+"So I heard."
+
+"Ah! But I was seen to slay a man of my own regiment."
+
+"On this side the border or that?" asked King artfully.
+
+"On this side."
+
+"Ah, but you were seen."
+
+"Ay! But that is no man's business. In India I earned in my salt. I
+obeyed the law. There is no law here in the 'Hills.' I am minded to
+go back and seek that pardon! It would feel good to stand in the rank
+again, with a stiff-backed sahib out in front of me, and the thunder of
+the gun-wheels going by. The salt was good! Come thou with me!"
+
+"The pardon is for deserters," King objected, "not for political
+offenders."
+
+"Haugh!" said the Pathan, bringing down his flat hand hard on the
+hakim's thigh. "I will attend to that for thee. I will obtain my pardon
+first. Then will I lead thee by the hand to the karnal sahib and lie to
+him and say, 'This is the one who persuaded me against my will to come
+back to the regiment!"'
+
+"And he will believe? Nay, I would be afraid!" said King.
+
+"Would a pardon not be good?" the Pathan asked him. "A pardon and leave
+to swagger through the bazaars again and make trouble with the daughters
+and wives of fat traders--a pardon--Allah! It would be good to salute
+the karnal sahib again and see him raise a finger, thus; and to have
+the captain sahib call me a scoundrel--or some worse name if he loves me
+very much, for the English are a strange race--"
+
+"Thou art a dreamer!" said King. "Untie my hands; the thong cuts me."
+The Pathan obeyed.
+
+"Dreamer, am I? It is good to dream such dreams. By Allah, I've a mind
+to see that dream come true! I never slew a man on Indian soil, only in
+these 'Hills.' I will go to them and say 'Here I am! I am a deserter. I
+seek that pardon!' 'Truly I will go! Come thou with me, little hakim!"
+
+"Nay," said King, "I have another thought."
+
+"What then?"
+
+"You, who were seen to slay a man a yard this side of the border--"
+
+"Nay; half a mile this side!"
+
+"Half a mile, then. You who were seen to slay a fellow soldier of your
+regiment, and I who am a political offender, do not win pardons so
+easily as that."
+
+"Would they hang us?"
+
+That was the first squeamishness the Pathan had shown of any kind,
+but men of his race would rather be tortured to death than hanged in a
+merciful hempen noose.
+
+"They would hang us," said King, "unless we came bearing gifts."
+
+"Gifts? Has Allah touched thee? What gifts should we bring? A dozen
+stolen rifles? A bag of silver? And I am the dreamer, am I?"
+
+"Nay," said King. "I am the dreamer. I have seen a good vision."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"There are others in these Hills--others in Khinjan who wear British
+medals?"
+
+The Pathan nodded.
+
+"How many?" asked King.
+
+"Hundreds. Men fight first on one side, then on the other, being true to
+either side while the contract lasts. In all there must be the makings
+of many regiments among the 'Hills.'"
+
+King nodded. He himself had seen the chieftains come to parley after
+the Tirah war. Most of them had worn British medals and had worn them
+proudly.
+
+"If we two," he said, speaking slowly, "could speak with some of those
+men and stir the spirit in them and persuade them to feel as thou dost,
+mentioning the pardon for deserters and the probability of bonuses to
+the time-expired for reenlistment; if we could march down the Khyber
+with a hundred such, or even with fifty or with twenty-five or with
+a dozen men--we would receive our pardon for the sake of service
+rendered."
+
+"Good!"
+
+The Pathan thumped him on the back so hard that his eyes watered.
+
+"We would have to use much caution," King advised him, when he was able
+to speak again.
+
+"Aye! If Bull-with-a-beard got wind of it he would have us crucified.
+And if she heard of it--"
+
+He was silent. Apparently there were no words in his tongue that could
+compass his dread of her revenge. He was silent for ten minutes,
+and King sat still beside him, letting memory of other days do its
+work--memory of the long, clean regimental lines, and of order and
+decency and of justice handed out to all and sundry by gentlemen who did
+not think themselves too good to wear a native regiment's uniform.
+
+"In two days I could do the drill again as well as ever," he said at
+last. Then there was silence again for fifteen minutes more. "I could
+always shoot," he murmured; "I could always shoot."
+
+When Muhammad Anim came back they had both forgotten to replace the
+lashing on King's wrists, but the mullah seemed not to notice it.
+
+"Come!" he ordered, with a sidewise jerk of his great ugly head, and
+then stood muttering impatiently while they obeyed.
+
+He had twice the number of women with him, but none of them the same;
+and he had brought five ruffians to guard them, who pounced on the
+captured rifles and claimed one apiece, to the Pathan's loud-growled
+disgust. Then the women were made to gather up King's belongings, and at
+a word from the mullah they started in single file--the mullah leading,
+then two men, then King, then the Orakzai Pathan, and then the other
+three. The Pathan began to whisper busily to the man next behind and
+noticing that King looked straight forward and contented himself; his
+heart was singing within him unexplainedly; he wanted to sing and dance,
+as once David did before the ark. He did not feel in the least like a
+prisoner.
+
+They marched downward through interminable tunnels and along ledges
+poised between earth and heaven, until they came at last to the tunnel
+leading to the one entrance into Khinjan Caves. Just before they entered
+it two more of the mullah's men came up with them, leading horses. One
+horse was for the mullah, and they helped King mount the other, showing
+him more respect than is usually shown a prisoner in the "Hills."
+
+Then the mullah led the way into the tunnel, and he seemed in deadly
+fear. The echo of the hoof-beats irritated him. He eyed each hole in the
+roof as if Yasmini might be expected to shoot down at him or drench him
+with boiling oil and hurried past each of them at a trot, only to draw
+rein immediately afterward because the noise was too great.
+
+It became evident that his men had been at work here too, for at
+intervals along the passage lay dead bodies. Yasmini must have posted
+the men there, but where was she? Each of them lay dead with a knife
+wound in his back, and the mullah's men possessed themselves of rifles
+and knives and cartridges, wiping off blood that had scarcely cooled
+yet.
+
+When they came to the end of the tunnel it was to find the door into
+the mosque open in front of them, and twenty more of Muhammad Anim's men
+standing guard over the eyelashless mullah. They had bound and gagged
+him. At a word from Muhammad Anim they loosed him; and at a threat the
+hairless one gave a signal that brought the great stone door sliding
+forward on its oiled bronze grooves.
+
+Then, with a dozen jests thrown to the hairless one for consolation, and
+an utter indifference to the sacredness of the mosque floor, they sought
+outer air, and Muhammad Anim led them up the Street of the Dwellings
+toward Khinian's outer ramparts. They reached the outer gate without
+incident and hurried into the great dry valley beyond it. As they rode
+across the valley the mullah thumbed a long string of beads. Unlike
+Yasmini, he was praying to one god; but he seemed to have many prayers.
+His back was a picture of determined treachery--the backs of his men
+were expressions of the creed that "He shall keep who can!" King rode
+all but last now and had a good view of their unconsciously vaunted
+blackguardism. There was not a hint of honor or tenderness among the
+lot, man, woman or mullah. Yet his heart sang within him as if he were
+riding to his own marriage feast!
+
+Last of all, close behind him, marched his friend, the Orakzai Pathan,
+and as they picked their way among the boulders across the mile-wide
+moat the two contrived to fall a little to the rear. The Pathan began
+speaking in a whisper and King, riding with lowered head as if he were
+studying the dangerous track, listened with both ears.
+
+"She sent her man Rewa Gunga toward the Khyber with a message," he
+whispered. "He took a few men with him, and he is to send them with the
+message when they reach the Khyber, but he is to come back. All he
+went for is to make sure the message is not intercepted, for
+Bull-with-a-beard is growing reckless these days. He knew what was doing
+and said at once that she is treating with the British, but there were
+few who believed that. There are more who wonder where she hides while
+the message is on its way. None has seen her. Men have swarmed into the
+Cavern of Earth's Drink and howled for her, but she did not come. Then
+the mullah went to look for his ammunition that he stored and sealed in
+a cave. And it was gone. It was all gone. And there was no proof of who
+had taken it!
+
+"Hakim, there be some who say--and Bull-with-a-beard is one of
+them--that she is afraid and hides. Men say she fears vengeance for the
+stolen ammunition, because it was plenty for a conquest of India. So men
+say. So say these here, for I have asked them."
+
+"And thou?" asked King, struggling to keep the note of exultation from
+his voice. He did not believe she was hiding. She might be staring into
+a crystal in some secret cave--she might be planning new mischief of any
+kind. But afraid she was surely not. And just as surely he could vow she
+was working out her own undoing.
+
+"I?" said the Pathan. "I swear she is afraid of nothing. If she has
+taken all the ammunition, then we shall hear from it again and from her
+too!"
+
+"And what of me?" asked King. "What will the mullah do with me?"
+
+"His men say he is desperate. His own are losing faith in him. He
+snatched thee to be a bait for her, having it in mind that a man whom
+she hides in her private part of Khinjan must be of great value to her.
+He has sworn to have thee skinned alive on a hot rock should she fail to
+come to terms!"
+
+That being not such a comforting reflection, King rode in silence for
+a while, with the Pathan trudging solemnly beside his stirrup keeping
+semblance of guard over him. When they reached the steep escarpment he
+had to dismount, although the mullah in the lead tried to make his own
+beast carry him up the lower spur and was mad--angry with his men for
+laughing when the horse fell back with him.
+
+Far in the rear King and the Pathan shoved and hauled and nearly lost
+their horse a dozen times at that. But once at the top the mullah set a
+furious pace and the laden women panted in their efforts to keep up, the
+men taking less notice of them than if they had been animals.
+
+The march went on in single file until the sun died down in splendid
+fury. Then there began to be a wind that they had to lean against, but
+the women were allowed no rest.
+
+At last at a place where the trail began to widen, the mullah beckoned
+King to ride beside him. It was not that he wished to be communicative,
+but there were things King knew that he did not know, and he had his own
+way of asking questions.
+
+"Damned hakim!" he growled. "Pill-man! Poulticer! That is a sweeper's
+trade of thine! Thou shalt apply it at my camp! I have some wounded and
+some sick."
+
+King did not answer, but buttoned his coat closer against the keen wind.
+The mullah mistook the shudder for one of another kind.
+
+"Did she choose thee only for thy face?" he asked. "Did she not consider
+thy courage? Does she love thee well enough to ransom thee?"
+
+Again King did not answer, but he watched the mullah's face keenly in
+the dark and missed nothing of its expression. He decided the man was in
+doubt---even racked by indecision.
+
+"Should she not ransom thee, hakim, thou shall have a chance to show
+my men how a man out of India can die! By and by I will lend thee a
+messenger to send to her. Better make the message clear and urgent!
+Thou shalt state my terms to her and plead thine own cause in the same
+letter. My camp lies yonder."
+
+He motioned with one sweep of his arm toward a valley that lay in shadow
+far below them. As far as the slope leading down to it was visible in
+the moonlight it was littered with what the "Hills" call "hell-stones,"
+that will neither lie flat nor keep on rolling, and are dangerous to man
+and beast alike. Nothing else could be made out through the darkness but
+a few twisted tamarisk trees, that served to make the savagery yet more
+savage and the loneliness more desolate. The gloom below the trees was
+that of the very underdepths of hell itself.
+
+The mullah pointed to a rock that rose like a shadow from the deeper
+blackness.
+
+"Yes," said King, "I have seen." And the mullah stared at him. Then he
+shouted, and the top of the rock turned into a man, who gave them leave
+to advance, leaning on his rifle as one who had assured himself of their
+identity long minutes ago.
+
+As they approached it the rock clove in two and became two great
+pillars, with a man on each. And between the pillars they looked down
+into a valley lit by fires that burned before a thousand hide tents,
+with shadows by the hundred flitting back and forth between them. A dull
+roar, like the voice of an army, rose out of the gorge.
+
+"More than four thousand men!" said the mullah proudly.
+
+"What are four thousand for a raid into India?" sneered King, greatly
+daring.
+
+"Wait and see!" growled the mullah; but he seemed depressed.
+
+He led the way downward, getting off his horse and giving the reins to
+a man. King copied him, and part-way sliding, part stumbling down they
+found their way along the dry bed of a water-course between two spurs
+of a hillside, until they stood at last in the midst of a cluster of a
+dozen sentries, close to a tamarisk to which a man's body hung spiked.
+That the man had been spiked to it alive was suggested by the body's
+attitude.
+
+Without a word to the sentries the mullah led on down a lane through the
+midst of the camp, toward a great open cave at the far side, in which a
+bonfire cast fitful light and shadow. Watchers sitting by the thousand
+tents yawned at them, but took no particular notice.
+
+The mouth of the cave was like a lion's, fringed with teeth. There were
+men in it, ten or eleven of them, all armed, squatting round the fire.
+
+"Get out!" growled the mullah. But they did not obey. They sat and
+stared at him.
+
+"Have ye tents?" the mullah asked, in a voice like thunder.
+
+"Aye!" But they did not go yet.
+
+One of the men, he nearest the mullah, got on his feet, but he had to
+step back a pace, for the mullah would not give ground and their breath
+was in each other's faces.
+
+"Where are the bombs? And the rifles? And the many cartridges?" he
+demanded. "We have waited long, Muhammad Anim. Where are they now?"
+
+The others got up, to lend the first man encouragement. They leaned on
+rifles and surrounded the mullah, so that King could only get a glimpse
+of him between them. They seemed in no mood to be treated cavalierly--in
+no mood to be argued with. And the Mullah did not argue.
+
+"Ye dogs!" he growled at them, and he strode through them to the fire
+and chose himself a good, thick burning brand. "Ye sons of nameless
+mothers!"
+
+Then he charged them suddenly, beating them over head and face and
+shoulders, driving them in front of him, utterly reckless of their
+rifles. His own rifle lay on the ground behind him, and King kicked its
+stock clear of the fire.
+
+"Oh, I shall pray for you this night!" Muhammad Anim snarled. "What a
+curse I shall beg for you! Oh, what a burning of the bowels ye shall
+have! What a sickness! What running of the eyes! What sores! What boils!
+What sleepless nights and faithless women shall be yours! What a prayer
+I will pray to Allah!"
+
+They scattered into outer gloom before his rage, and then came back
+to kneel to him and beg him withdraw his curse. He kicked them as they
+knelt and drove them away again. Then, silhouetted in the cave mouth,
+with the glow of the fire behind him, he stood with folded arms and
+dared them shoot. He lacked little in that minute of being a full-grown
+brute at bay. King admired him, with reservations.
+
+After five minutes of angry contemplation of the camp he turned on a
+contemptuous heel and came back to the fire, throwing on more fuel from
+a great pile in a corner. There was an iron pot in the embers. He seized
+a stick and stirred the contents furiously, then set the pot between
+his knees and ate like an animal. He passed the pot to King when he had
+finished, but fingers had passed too many times through what was left in
+it and the very thought of eating the mess made his gorge rise; so King
+thanked him and set the pot aside.
+
+Then, "That is thy place!" Muhammad Anim growled, pointing over his
+shoulder to a ledge of rock, like a shelf in the far wall. There was a
+bed upon it, of cotton blankets stuffed with dry grass. King walked over
+and felt the blankets and found them warm from the last man who had lain
+there. They smelt of him too. He lifted them and laughed. Taking the
+whole in both hands he carried it to the fire and threw it in, and the
+sudden blaze made the mullah draw away a yard; but it did not make him
+speak.
+
+"Bugs!" King explained, but the mullah showed no interest. He watched,
+however, as King went back to the bed, and subsequent proceedings seemed
+to fascinate him.
+
+Out of the chest that one of the women had set down King took soap.
+There was a pitcher of water between him and the fire; he carried it
+nearer. With an improvised scrubbing brush of twigs he proceeded to
+scrub every inch of the rock-shelf, and when he had done and had dried
+it more or less, he stripped and began to scrub himself.
+
+"Who taught thee thy squeamishness?" the mullah asked at last, getting
+up and coming nearer. It was well that King's skin was dark (although
+it was many shades lighter than his face, that had been stained so
+carefully). The mullah eyed him from head to foot and looked awfully
+suspicious, but something prompted King and he answered without an
+instant's hesitation.
+
+"Why ask a woman's questions?" he retorted. "Only women ask when they
+know the answer. When I watched thee with the firebrand a short while
+ago, oh, mullah, I mistook thee lor a man."
+
+The mullah grunted and began to tug his beard. But King said no more and
+went on washing himself.
+
+"I forgot," said the mullah then, "that thou art her pet. She would not
+love thee unless thy smell was sweet."
+
+"No," said King quite cheerfully--going it blind, for he did not know
+what had possessed him to take that line, but knew he might as well be
+hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. "No, if I stank like thee she would not
+love me."
+
+The mullah snorted and went back to the fire, but he took King's cake of
+soap with him and sat examining it.
+
+"Tauba!" he swore suddenly as if he had made a gruesome discovery. "Such
+filthy stuff is made from the fat of pigs!"
+
+"Doubtless!" said King. "That is why she uses it, and why I use it. She
+is a better Muhammadan than thou. She would surely cleanse her skin with
+the fat of pigs!"
+
+"Thou art a shameless one!" said the mullah, shaking his head like a
+bear.
+
+"I am what Allah made me!" answered King, and then, for the sake of the
+impression, he went through the outward form of muslim prayer, spreading
+a mat and omitting none of the genuflections. When he had finished he
+unfolded his own blankets that a woman had thrown down beside the chest
+and spread them carefully on the rock-shelf. But though he was allowed
+to climb up and lie there, he was not allowed to sleep--nor did he want
+to sleep--for more than an hour to come.
+
+The mullah came over from the fire again and stood beside him, glaring
+like a great animal and grumbling in his beard.
+
+"Does she surely love thee?" he asked at last, and King nodded, because
+he knew he was on the trail of information.
+
+"So thou art to ape the Sleeper in his bronze mail, eh? Thou art to
+come to life, as she was said to come to life, and the two of you are to
+plunder India? Is that it?"
+
+King nodded again, for a nod is less committal than a word; and the nod
+was enough to start the mullah off again.
+
+"I saw the Sleeper and his bride before she knew of either! It was I who
+let her into Khinjan! It was I who told the men she is the 'Heart of
+the Hills' come to life! She tricked me! But this is no hour for bearing
+grudges. She has a plan and I am minded to help."
+
+King lay still and looked up at him, sure that treachery was the
+ultimate end of any plan the mullah Muhammad Anim had. India has been
+saved by the treachery of her enemies more often than ruined by false
+friends. So has the world, for that matter.
+
+"A jihad when the right hour comes will raise the tribes," the mullah
+growled. "She and thou, as the Sleeper and his mate, could work
+wonders. But who can trust her? She stole that head! She stole all the
+ammunition! Does she surely love thee?"
+
+King nodded again, for modesty could not help him at that juncture. Love
+and boastfulness go together in the "Hills."
+
+"She shall have thee back, then, at a price!"
+
+King did not answer. His brown eyes watched the mullah's, and he drew
+his breath in little jerks, lest by breathing aloud he should miss one
+word of what, was coming.
+
+"She shall have thee back against Khinian and the ammunition! She and
+thou shall have India, but I shall be the power behind you! She must
+give me Khinjan and the ammunition! She must admit me to the inner
+caves, whence her damned guards expelled me. I must have the reins in my
+two hands so! Then, thou and she shall have the pomp and glitter while I
+guide!"
+
+King did not answer.
+
+"Dost understand?"
+
+King murmured something unintelligible.
+
+"Otherwise, I and my men will storm Khinjan, and she and thou shall go
+down into Earth's Drink lashed together!"
+
+King shuddered, not because he felt afraid, but because some instinct
+told him to make the mullah think him afraid. He was far too interested
+to be fearful.
+
+"Ye shall both be tortured before the plunge into the river! She shall
+be tortured in the Cavern of Earth's Drink before the men!"
+
+King shuddered again, this time without an effort. He could imagine the
+thousands watching grimly while the flayer used his knife.
+
+"I have men in Khinjan! I have as many as she! On the day I march there
+will be a revolt within. She would better agree to terms!"
+
+King lay looking at him, like a prisoner on the rack undergoing
+examination. He did not answer.
+
+"Write thou a letter. Since she loves thee, state thine own case to her.
+Tell her that I hold thee hostage, and that Khinjan is mine already for
+a little fighting. In a month she can not pick out my men from among
+her own. Her position is undermined. Tell her that. Tell her that if she
+obeys she shall have India and be queen. If she disobeys, she shall die
+in the Cavern of Earth's Drink!"
+
+"She is a proud woman, mullah," answered King. "Threats to such as
+she--?"
+
+The mullah mumbled and strode back and forth three times between King's
+bed and the fire, with his fists knotted together behind him and his
+head bent, as Napoleon used to walk. When he stood beside the bed again
+at last it was with his mind made up, as his clenched fists and his eyes
+indicated.
+
+"Make thine own terms with her!" he growled. "Write the letter and send
+it! I hold thee; she holds Khinjan and the ammunition. I am between her
+and India. So be it. She shall starve in there! She shall lie in there
+until the war is over and take what terms are offered her in the end!
+Write thine own letter! State the case, and bid her answer!"
+
+"Very well," said King. He began to see now definitely how India was to
+be saved. It was none of his business to plan yet, but to help others'
+plans destroy themselves and to sow such seed in the broken ground as
+might bear fruit in time.
+
+The mullah left him, to squat and gaze into the fire, and mutter, and
+King lay still. After a while the mullah went and carried a great water
+bowl nearer to the fire and, as King had done, stripped himself. Then he
+heaped great fagots on the fire--wasteful fagots, each of which had cost
+some woman hours of mountain climbing. And in the glow of the leaping
+flame he scrubbed himself from head to foot with King's soap. Finally,
+with a feat of strength that nearly forced an exclamation out of King,
+he lifted the great water bowl in both hands and emptied the whole
+contents over himself. Then he resumed his smelly garments without
+troubling to dry his body, and got out a Quran from a corner and began
+to read it in a nasal singsong that would have kept dead men awake. King
+lay and watched and listened.
+
+Reading scripture only seemed to fire the mullah's veins. For him sleep
+was either out of reach or despicable, perhaps both. He seemed in a mood
+to despise anything but conquest and strode back and forth up and down
+the cave like a caged bear, muttering to himself.
+
+After a time he went to the mouth of the cave, to stand and stare out
+at the camp where the thousand fires were dying fitfully and wood smoke
+purged the air of human nastiness. The stars looked down on him, and he
+seemed to try to read them, standing with fists knotted together at his
+back.
+
+And as he stood so, six other mullahs came to him and began to argue
+with him in low tones, he browbeating them all with furious words hissed
+between half-closed teeth. They were whispering still when King fell
+asleep. It was courage, not carelessness, that let him sleep--courage
+and a great hope born of the mullah's perplexity.
+
+He dreamed that he was writing, writing, writing, while the torturers
+made a hot fire ready in the Cavern of Earth's Drink and whetted knives
+on the bridge end while the organ played The Marseillaise. He dreamed
+Yasmini came to him and whispered the solution to it all, but what she
+whispered he could not catch, although she whispered the same words
+again and again and seemed to be angry with him for not listening.
+
+And when he awoke at last he had fragments of his blanket in either
+hand, and the sun was already shining into the jaws of the cave. The
+camp was alive and reeked of cooking food. But the mullah was gone, and
+so was all the money the women had brought, together with his medicines
+and things from Khinjan.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII
+
+
+
+     When the last evil jest has been made, and the rest
+     Of the ink of hypocrisy spilt,
+     When the awfully right have elected to fight
+     Lest their own should discover their guilt;
+     When the door has been shut on the "if" and the "but"
+     And it's up to the men with the guns,
+     On their knees in that day let diplomatists pray
+     For forgiveness from prodigal sons.
+
+
+Instead of the mullah, growling texts out of a Quran on his lap, the
+Orakzai Pathan sat and sunned himself in the cave mouth, emitting
+worldlier wisdom unadulterated with divinity. As King went toward him
+to see to whom he spoke he grinned and pointed with his thumb, and King
+looked down on some sick and wounded men who sat in a crowd together on
+the ramp, ten feet or so below the cave.
+
+They seemed stout soldierly fellows. Men of another type were being kept
+at a distance by dint of argument and threats. Away in the distance was
+Muhammad Anim with his broad back turned to the cave, in altercation
+with a dozen other mullahs. For the time he was out of the reckoning.
+
+"Some of these are wounded," the Pathan explained. "Some have sores.
+Some have the belly ache. Then again, some are sick of words, hot and
+cold by day and night. All have served in the army. All have medals.
+All are deserters, some for one reason, some for another and some for no
+reason at all. Bull-with-a-beard looks the other way. Speak thou to them
+about the pardon that is offered!"
+
+So King went down among them, taking some of the tools of his supposed
+trade with him and trying to crowd down the triumph that would well up.
+The seed he had sown had multiplied by fifty in a night. He wanted to
+shout, as men once did before the walls of Jericho.
+
+A man bared a sword cut. He bent over him, and if the mullah had turned
+to look there would have been no ground for suspicion. So in a voice
+just loud enough to reach them all, he repeated what he had told the
+Pathan the day before.
+
+"But who art thou?" asked one of them suspiciously. Perhaps there had
+been a shade too much cocksureness in the hakim's voice, but he acted
+faultlessly when he answered. Voice, accent, mannerism, guilty pride,
+were each perfect.
+
+"Political offender. My brother yonder in the cave mouth"--(The Pathan
+smirked. He liked the imputation)--"suggested I seek pardon, too.
+He thinks if I persuade many to apply for pardon then the sirkar may
+forgive me for service rendered."
+
+The Pathan's smirk grew to a grin. He liked grandly to have the notion
+fathered on himself; and his complacency of course was suggestive of the
+hakim's trustworthiness. But the East is ever cautious.
+
+"Some say thou art a very great liar," remarked a man with half a nose.
+
+"Nay," answered King. "Liar I may be, but I am one against many. Which
+of you would dare stand alone and lie to all the others? Nay, sahibs, I
+am a political offender, not a soldier!"
+
+They all laughed at that and seizing the moment when they were in a
+pliant mood the Orakzai Pathan proceeded to bring proposals to a head.
+
+"Are we agreed?" he asked. "Or have we waggled our beards all night long
+in vain? Take him with us, say I. Then, if pardons are refused us he at
+least will gain nothing by it. We can plunge our knives in him first,
+whatever else happens."
+
+"Aye!"
+
+That was reasonable and they approved in chorus. Possibility of pardon
+and reinstatement, though only heard of at second hand, had brought
+unity into being. And unity brought eagerness.
+
+"Let us start to-night!" urged one man, and nobody hung back.
+
+"Aye! Aye! Aye!" they chorused. And eagerness, as always in the "Hills,"
+brought wilder counsel in its wake.
+
+"Who dare stab Bull-with-a-beard? He has sought blood and has let blood.
+Let him drink his own."
+
+"Aye!"
+
+"Nay! He is too well guarded."
+
+"Not he!"
+
+"Let us stab him and take his head with us; there well may be a price on
+it."
+
+They took a vote on it and were agreed; but that did not suit King at
+all, whatever Muhammad Anim's personal deserts might be. To let him be
+stabbed would be to leave Yasmini without a check on her of any kind,
+and then might India defend herself! Yet to leave the mullah and Yasmini
+both at large would be almost equally dangerous, for they might form an
+alliance. There must be some other way, and he set out to gain time.
+
+"Nay, nay, sahibs!" he urged. "Nay, nay!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Sahibs, I have wife and children in Lahore. Same are most dear to me
+and I to them. I find it expedient to make great effort for my pardon.
+Ye are but fifty. Ye are less than fifty. Nay, let us gather a hundred
+men."
+
+"Who shall find a hundred?" somebody demanded, and there was a chorus of
+denial. "We be all in this camp who ate the salt."
+
+It was plain, though, that his daring to hold out only gave them the
+more confidence in him.
+
+"But Khinjan," he objected. The crimes of the Khinjan men were not to
+the point. Time had to be gained.
+
+"Aye," they agreed. "There be many in Khinjan!" Mere mention of the
+place made them regard Orakzai Pathan and hakim with new respect, as
+having right of entry through the forbidden gate.
+
+"Then I have it!" the Pathan announced at once, for he was awake to
+opportunity. "Many of you can hardly march. Rest ye here and let the
+hakim treat your belly aches. Bull-with-a-beard bade me wait here for a
+letter that must go to Khinjan to-day. Good. I will take his letter.
+And in Khinjan I will spread news about pardons. It is likely there are
+fifty there who will dare follow me back, and then we shall march down
+the Khyber like a full company of the old days! Who says that is not a
+good plan?"
+
+There were several who said it was not, but they happened to have
+nothing the matter with them and could have marched at once. The rest
+were of the other way of thinking and agreed in asserting that Khinjan
+men were a higher caste of extra-ultra murderers whose presence
+doubtless would bring good luck to the venture. These prevailed after
+considerable argument.
+
+Strangely enough, none of them deemed the proposition beneath Khinjan
+men's consideration. Pardon and leave to march again behind British
+officers loomed bigger in their eyes than the green banner of the
+Prophet, which could only lead to more outrageous outlawry. They knew
+Khinjan men were flesh and blood--humans with hearts--as well as they.
+But caution had a voice yet.
+
+"She will catch thee in Khinjan Caves," suggested the man with part of
+his nose missing. "She will have thee flayed alive!"
+
+"Take note then, I bequeath all the women in the world to thee! Be thou
+heir to my whole nose, too, and a blessing!" laughed the Pathan, and
+the butt of the jest spat savagely. In the "Hills" there is only one
+explanation given as to how one lost his nose, and they all laughed like
+hyenas until the mullah Muhammad Anim came rolling and striding back.
+
+By that time King had got busy with his lancet, but the mullah called
+him off and drove the crowd away to a distance; then he drove King into
+the cave in front of him, his mouth working as if he were biting bits of
+vengeance off for future use.
+
+"Write thy letter, thou! Write thy letter! Here is paper. There is a
+pen--take it! Sit! Yonder is ink--ttutt--ttutt!--Write, now, write!"
+
+King sat at a box and waited, as if to take dictation, but the mullah,
+tugging at his beard, grew furious.
+
+"Write thine own letter! Invent thine own argument! Persuade her, or die
+in a new way! I will invent a new way for thee!"
+
+So King began to write, in Urdu, for reasons of his own. He had spoken
+once or twice in Urdu to the mullah and had received no answer. At the
+end of ten minutes he handed up what he had written, and Muhammad Anim
+made as if to read it, trying to seem deliberate, and contriving to look
+irresolute. It was a fair guess that he hated to admit ignorance of the
+scholars' language.
+
+"Are there any alterations you suggest?" King asked him.
+
+"Nay, what care I what the words are? If she be not persuaded, the worse
+for thee!"
+
+He held it out, and as he took it King contrived to tear it; he also
+contrived to seem ashamed of his own clumsiness.
+
+"I will copy it out again," he said.
+
+The mullah swore at him, and conceiving that some extra show of
+authority was needful, growled out:
+
+"Remember all I said. Set down she must surrender Khinjan Caves or I
+swear by Allah I will have thee tortured with fire and thorns--and her,
+too, when the time comes!"
+
+Now he had said that, or something very like it, in the first letter.
+There was no doubt left that the Mullah was trying to hide ignorance,
+as men of that fanatic ambitious mold so often will at the expense of
+better judgment. If fanatics were all-wise, it would be a poor world for
+the rest.
+
+"Very well," King said quietly. And with great pretense of copying the
+other letter out on fresh paper he now wrote what he wished to say,
+taking so long about it (for he had to weigh each word), that the mullah
+strode up and down the cave swearing and kicking things over.
+
+        "Greeting,"' he wrote, "to the most beautiful and very
+        wise Princess Yasmini, in her palace in the Caves in
+        Khinjan, from her servant Kurram Khan the hakim, in
+        the camp of the mullah Muhammad Anim, a night's march
+        distant in the hills.
+
+        "The mullah Muhammad Anim makes his stand and demands
+        now surrender to himself of Khinjan Caves; and of all
+        his ammunition.  Further, he demands full control of
+        you and of me and of all your men.  He is ready to
+        fight for his demands and already--as you must well
+        know--he has considerable following in Khinjan Caves.
+        He has at least as many men as you have, and he has
+        four thousand more here.
+
+        "He threatens as a preliminary to blockade Khinjan
+        Caves, unless the answer to this prove favorable,
+        letting none enter, but calling his own men out to
+        join him.  This would suit the Indian government,
+        because while the 'Hills' fight among themselves
+        they can not raid India, and while he blockades
+        Khinjan Caves there will be time to move against him.
+
+        "Knowing that he dares begin and can accomplish what
+        he threatens, I am sorry;  because I know it is said
+        how many services you have rendered of old to the
+        government I serve.  We who serve one raj are One--one
+        to remember--one to forget--one to help each other in
+        good time.
+
+        "I have not been idle.  Some of Muhammad Anim's men
+        are already mine.  With them I can return to India,
+        taking information with me that will serve my government.
+        My men are eager to be off.
+
+        "It may be that vengeance against me would seem sweeter
+        to you than return to your former allegiance.  In that
+        case, Princess, you only need betray me to the mullah,
+        and be sure my death would leave nothing to be desired
+        by the spectators.  At present he does not suspect me.
+
+        "Be assured, however, that not to betray me to him is
+        to leave me free to serve my government and well able
+        to do so.
+
+        "I invite you to return to India with me, bearing news
+        that the mullah Muhammad Anim and his men are bottled
+        in Khinjan Caves, and to plan with me to that end.
+
+        "If you will, then write an answer to Muhammad Anim,
+        not in Urdu, but in a language he can understand;  seem
+        to surrender to him.  But to me send a verbal message,
+        either by the bearer of this or by some trustier messenger.
+
+        "India can profit yet by your service if you will.  And
+        in that case I pledge my word to direct the government's
+        attention only to your good service in the matter.  It is
+        not yet too late to choose.  It is not impertinent in me
+        to urge you.
+
+        "Nor can I say how gladly I would subscribe myself your
+        grateful and loyal servant."
+
+The mullah pounced on the finished letter, pretended to read it, and
+watched him seal it up, smudging the hot wax with his own great gnarled
+thumb. Then he shouted for the Orakzai Pathan, who came striding in, all
+grins and swagger.
+
+"There--take it! Make speed!" he ordered, and with his rifle at the
+"ready" and the letter tucked inside his shirt, the Pathan favored King
+with a farewell grin and obeyed.
+
+"Get out!" the mullah snarled then immediately. "See to the sick. Tell
+them I sent thee. Bid them be grateful!"
+
+King went. He recognized the almost madness that constituted the
+mullah's driving power. It is contagious, that madness, until it
+destroys itself. It had made several thousand men follow him and believe
+in him, but it had once given Yasmini a chance to fool him and defeat
+him, and now it gave King his chance. He let the mullah think himself
+obeyed implicitly.
+
+He became the busiest man in all the "Hills." While the mullah glowered
+over the camp from the cave mouth or fulminated from the Quran or fought
+with other mullahs with words for weapons and abuse for argument, he
+bandaged and lanced and poulticed and physicked until his head swam with
+weariness.
+
+The sick swarmed so around him that he had to have a body-guard to keep
+them at bay; so he chose twenty of the least sick from among those who
+had talked with him after sunrise.
+
+And because each of those men had friends, and it is only human to wish
+one's friend in the same boat, especially when the sea, so to speak, is
+rough, the progress through the camp became a current of missionary zeal
+and the virtues of the Anglo-Indian raj were better spoken of than the
+"Hills" had heard for years.
+
+Not that there was any effort made to convert the camp en masse. Far
+from it. But the likely few were pounced on and were told of a chance to
+enlist for a bounty in India. And what with winter not so far ahead, and
+what with experience of former fighting against the British army, the
+choosing was none so difficult. From the day when the lad first feels
+soft down upon his face until the old man's beard turns white and his
+teeth shake out, the Hillman would rather fight than eat; but he prefers
+to fight on the winning side if he may, and he likes good treatment.
+
+Before if was dark that night there were thirty men sworn to hold
+their tongues and to wait for the word to hurry down the Khyber for the
+purpose of enlisting in some British-Indian regiment. Some even began
+to urge the hakim not to wait for the Orakzai Pathan, but to start with
+what he had.
+
+"Shall I leave my brother in the lurch?" the hakim asked them; and
+though they murmured, they thought better of him for it.
+
+Well for him that he had plenty of Epsom salts in his kit, for in the
+"Hills" physic should taste evil and show very quick results to be
+believed in. He found a dozen diseases of which he did not so much as
+know the name, but half of the sufferers swore they were cured after the
+first dose. They would have dubbed him faquir and have foisted him to a
+pillar of holiness had he cared to let them.
+
+Muhammad Anim slept most of the day, like a great animal that scorns to
+live by rule. But at evening he came to the cave mouth and fulminated
+such a sermon as set the whole camp to roaring. He showed his power
+then. The jihad he preached would have tempted dead men from their
+graves to come and share the plunder, and the curses he called down on
+cowards and laggards and unbelievers were enough to have frightened the
+dead away again.
+
+In twenty minutes he had undone all King's missionary work. And then
+in ten more, feeling his power and their response, and being at heart a
+fool as all rogues are, he built it up again.
+
+He began to make promises too definite. He wanted Khinjan Caves. More,
+he needed them. So he promised them they should all be free of Khinjan
+Caves within a day or two, to come and go and live there at their
+pleasure. He promised them they should leave their wives and children
+and belongings safe in the Caves while they themselves went down to
+plunder India. He overlooked the fact that Khinjan Caves for centuries
+had been a secret to be spoken of in whispers, and that prospect of its
+violation came to them as a shock.
+
+Half of them did not believe him. Such a thing was impossible, and if he
+were lying as to one point, why not as to all the others, too?
+
+And the army veterans, who had been converted by King's talk of pardons,
+and almost reconverted by the sermon, shook their heads at the talk of
+taking Khinjan. Why waste time trying to do what never had been done,
+with her to reckon against, when a place in the sun was waiting for them
+down in India, to say nothing of the hope of pardons and clean living
+for a while? They shook their heads and combed their beards and eyed one
+another sidewise in a way the "Hills" understand.
+
+That night, while the mullah glowered over the camp like a great old
+owl, with leaping firelight reflected in his eyes, the thousands under
+the skin tents argued, so that the night was all noise. But King slept.
+
+All of another day and part of another night he toiled among the sick,
+wondering when a message would come back. It was nearly midnight when
+he bandaged his last patient and came out into the starlight to bend his
+back straight and yawn and pick his way reeling with weariness back to
+the mullah's cave. He had given his bag of medicines and implements to
+a man to carry ahead of him and had gone perhaps ten paces into the dark
+when a strong hand gripped him by the wrist.
+
+"Hush!" said a voice that seemed familiar.
+
+He turned swiftly and looked straight into the eyes of the Rangar Rewa
+Gunga!
+
+"How did you get here?" he asked in English.
+
+"Any fool could learn the password into this camp! Come over here,
+sahib. I bring word from her."
+
+The ground was criss-crossed like a man's palm by the shadows of
+tent-ropes. The Rangar led him to where the tents were forty feet apart
+and none was likely to overhear them. There he turned like a flash.
+
+"She sends you this!" he hissed.
+
+In that same instant King was fighting for his life.
+
+In another second they were down together among the tent-pegs, King
+holding the Rangar's wrist with both hands and struggling to break
+it, and the Rangar striving for another stroke. The dagger he held
+had missed King's ribs by so little that his skin yet tingled from its
+touch. It was a dagger with bronze blade and a gold hilt--her dagger. It
+was her perfume in the air.
+
+They rolled over and over, breathing hard. King wanted to think before
+he gave an alarm, and he could not think with that scent in his nostrils
+and creeping into his lungs. Even in the stress of fighting be wondered
+how the Rangar's clothes and turban had come to be drenched in it. He
+admitted to himself afterward that it was nothing else than jealousy
+that suggested to him to make the Rangar prisoner and hand him over to
+the mullah.
+
+That would have been a ridiculous thing to do, for it would have forced
+his own betrayal to the mullah. But as if the Rangar had read his
+mind he suddenly redoubled his efforts and King, weary to the point of
+sickness, had to redouble his own or die. Perhaps the jealousy helped
+put venom in his effort, for his strength came back to him as a madman's
+does. The Rangar gave a moan and let the knife fall.
+
+And because jealousy is poison King did the wrong thing then. He
+pounced on the knife instead of on the Rangar. He could have questioned
+him--knelt on him and perhaps forced explanations from him. But with a
+sudden swift effort like a snake's the Rangar freed himself and was
+up and gone before King could struggle to his feet--gone like a shadow
+among shadows.
+
+King got up and felt himself all over, for they had fought on stony
+ground and he was bruised. But bruises faded into nothing, and weariness
+as well, as his mind began to dwell on the new complication to his
+problem.
+
+It was plain that the moment he had returned from his message to the
+Khyber the Rangar had been sent on this new murderous mission. If
+Yasmini had told the truth a letter had gone into India describing him,
+King, as a traitor, and from her point of view that might be supposed to
+cut the very ground away from under his feet.
+
+Then why so much trouble to have him killed? Either Rewa Gunga had never
+taken the first letter, or--and this seemed more probable--Yashiini had
+never believed the letter would be treated seriously by the authorities,
+and had only sent it in the hope of fooling him and undermining his
+determination. In that case, especially supposing her to have received
+his ultimatum on the mullah's behalf before sending Rewa Gunga with the
+dagger, she must consider him at least dangerous. Could she be afraid?
+If so her game was lost already!
+
+Perhaps she saw her own peril. Perhaps she contemplated--gosh! what a
+contingency!--perhaps she contemplated bolting into India with a story
+of her own, and leaving the mullah to his own devices! In such a case,
+before going she would very likely try to have the one man stabbed who
+could give her away most completely. In fact, would she dare escape into
+India and leave himself alive behind her?
+
+He rather thought she would dare do anything. And that thought brought
+reassurance. She would dare, and being what she was she almost surely
+would seek vengeance on the mullah before doing anything else.
+
+Then why the dagger for himself? She must believe him in league with the
+mullah against her. She might believe that with him out of the way the
+mullah would prove an easier prey for her. And that belief might be
+justifiable, but as an explanation it failed to satisfy.
+
+There was an alternative, the very thought of which made him fearfully
+uneasy, and yet brought a thrill with it. In all eastern lands, love
+scorned takes to the dagger. He had half believed her when she swore she
+loved him! The man who could imagine himself loved by Yasmini and not be
+thrilled to his core would be inhuman, whatever reason and caution and
+caste and creed might whisper in imagination's wake.
+
+Reeling from fatigue (he felt like a man who had been racked, for the
+Rangar's strength was nearly unbelievable), he started toward where the
+mullah sat glowering in the cave mouth. He found the man who had carried
+his bag asleep at the foot of the ramp, and taking the bag away from
+him, let him lie there. And it took him five minutes to drag his hurt
+weary bones up the ramp, for the fight had taken more out of him than he
+had guessed at first.
+
+The mullah glared at him but let him by without a word. It was by the
+fire at the back of the cave, where he stooped to dip water from the
+mullah's enormous crock that the next disturbing factor came to light.
+He kicked a brand into the fire and the flame leaped. Its light shone
+on a yard and a half of exquisitely fine hair, like spun gold, that
+caressed his shoulder and descended down one arm. One thread of hair
+that conjured up a million thoughts, and in a second upset every
+argument!
+
+If Rewa Gunga had been near enough to her and intimate enough with her
+not only to become scented with her unmistakable perfume but even to get
+her hair on his person, then gone was all imagination of her love for
+himself! Then she had lied from first to last! Then she had tried to
+make him love her that she might use him, and finding she had failed,
+she had sent her true love with the dagger to make an end!
+
+In a moment he imagined a whole picture, as it might have been in a
+crystal, of himself trapped and made to don the Roman's armor and forced
+to pose to the savage 'Hills'--or fooled into posing to them--as her
+lover, while Rewa Gunga lurked behind the scenes and waited for the
+harvest in the end. And what kind of harvest?
+
+And what kind of man must Rewa Gunga be who could lightly let go all
+the prejudices of the East and submit to what only the West has endured
+hitherto with any complacency--a "tertium quid"?
+
+Yet what a fool he, King, had been not to appreciate at once that Rewa
+Gunga must be her lover. Why should he not be? Were they not alike as
+cousins? And the East does not love its contrary, but its complement,
+being older in love than the West, and wiser in its ways in all but the
+material. He had been blind. He had overlooked the obvious--that from
+first to last her plan had been to set herself and this Rewa Gunga on
+the throne of India!
+
+He washed and went through the mummery of muslim prayers for the
+watchful mullah's sake, and climbed on to his bed. But sleep seemed out
+of the question. He lay and tossed for an hour, his mind as busy as a
+terrier in hay. And when he did fall asleep at last it was so to
+dream and mutter that the mullah came and shook him and preached him
+a half-hour sermon against the mortal sins that rob men of peaceful
+slumber by giving them a foretaste of the hell to come.
+
+All that seemed kinder and more refreshing than King's own thoughts had
+been, for when the mullah had done at last and had gone striding back to
+the cave mouth, he really did fall sound asleep, and it was after dawn
+when he awoke. The mullah's voice, not untuneful was rousing all the
+valley echoes in the call to prayer.
+
+        Allah is Almighty!  Allah is Almighty!
+        I declare there is no God but Allah!
+        I declare Muhammad is his prophet!
+        Hie ye to prayer!
+        Hie ye to salvation!
+        Prayer is better than sleep!
+        Prayer is better than sleep!
+        There is no God but Allah!
+
+And while King knelt behind the mullah and the whole camp faced Mecca in
+forehead-in-the-dust abasement there came a strange procession down the
+midst--not strange to the "Hills," where such sights are common, but
+strange to that camp and hour. Somebody rose and struck them, and they
+knelt like the rest; but when prayer was over and cooking had begun and
+the camp became a place of savory smell, they came on again--seven blind
+men.
+
+They were weary, ragged, lean--seven very tatter-demalions--and the
+front man led them, tapping the ground with a long stick. The others
+clung to him in line, one behind the other. He was the only clean-shaven
+one, and he was the tallest. He looked as if he had not been blind so
+long, for his physical health was better. All seven men yelled at the
+utmost of their lungs, but he yelled the loudest.
+
+"Oh, the hakim--the good hakim!" they wailed. "Where is the famous
+hakim? We be blind men--blind we be--blind--blind! Oh, pity us! Is any
+kismet worse than ours? Oh, show us to the hakim! Show us the way to
+him! Lead us to him! Oh, the famous, great, good hakim who can heal
+men's eyes!"
+
+The mullah looked down on them like a vulture waiting to see them die,
+and seeing they did not die, turned his back and went into his cave.
+Close to the ramp they stopped, and the front man, cocking his head to
+one side as only birds and the newly blind do, gave voice again in nasal
+singsong.
+
+"Will none tell me where is the great, good, wise hakim Kurram Khan?"
+
+"I am he," said King, and he stepped down toward him, calling to an
+assistant to come and bring him water and a sponge. The blind man's face
+looked strangely familiar, though it was partly disguised by some gummy
+stuff stuck all about the eyes. Taking it in both hands be tilted the
+eyes to the light and opened one eye with his thumb. There was nothing
+whatever the matter with it. He opened the other.
+
+"Rub me an ointment on!" the man urged him, and he stared at the face
+again.
+
+"Ismail!" he said. "You?"
+
+"Aye! Father of cleverness! Make play of healing my eyes!"
+
+So King dipped a sponge in water and sent back for his bag and made a
+great show of rubbing on ointment. In a minute Ismail, looking almost
+like a young man without his great beard, was dancing like a lunatic
+with both fists in the air, and yelling as if wasps had stung him.
+
+"Aieee--aieee--aieee!" he yelled. "I see again! I see! My eyes have
+light in them! Allah! Oh, Allah heap riches on the great wise hakfim who
+can heal men's eyes! Allah reward him richly, for I am a beggar and have
+no goods!"
+
+The other six blind men came struggling to be next, and while King
+rubbed ointment on their eyes and saw that there was nothing there he
+could cure the whole camp began to surge toward him to see the miracle,
+and his chosen body-guard rushed up to drive them back.
+
+"Find your way down the Khyber and ask for the Wilayti dakitar. He will
+finish the cure."
+
+The six blind men, half-resentful, half-believing, turned away, mainly
+because Ismail drove them with words and blows. And as they went a tall
+Afridi came striding down the camp with a letter for the mullah held out
+in a cleft stick in front of him.
+
+"Her answer!" said Ismail with a wicked grin.
+
+"What is her word? Where is the Orakzai Pathan?"
+
+But Ismail laughed and would not answer him. It seemed to King that he
+scented climax. So did his near-fifty and their thirty friends. He chose
+to take the arrival of the blind men as a hint from Providence and to
+"go it blind" on the strength of what he had hoped might happen. Also he
+chose in that instant to force the mullah's hand, on the principle that
+hurried buffaloes will blunder.
+
+"To Khinjan!" he shouted to the nearest man. "The mullah will march on
+Khinjan!"
+
+They murmured and wondered and backed away from him to give him room.
+Ismail watched him with dropped jaw and wild eye.
+
+"Spread it through the camp that we march on Khinjan! Shout it! Bid them
+strike the tents!"
+
+Somebody behind took up the shout and it went across the camp in leaps,
+as men toss a ball. There was a surge toward the tents, but King called
+to his deserters and they clustered back to him. He had to cement their
+allegiance now or fail altogether, and he would not be able to do it by
+ordinary argument or by pleading; he had to fire their imagination. And
+he did.
+
+"She is on our side!" That was a sheer guess. "She has kept our man and
+sent another as hostage for him in token of good faith! Listen! Ye saw
+this man's eyes healed. Let that be a token! Be ye the men with new
+eyes! Give it out! Claim the title and be true to it and see me guide
+you down the Khyber in good time like a regiment, many more than a
+hundred strong!"
+
+They jumped at the idea. The "Hills"--the whole East, for that
+matter--are ever ready to form a new sect or join a new band or a
+new blood-feud. Witness the Nikalseyns, who worship a long-since dead
+Englishman.
+
+"We see!" yelled one of them.
+
+"We see!" they chorused, and the idea took charge. From that minute they
+were a new band, with a war-cry of their own.
+
+"To Khinjan!" they howled, scattering through the camp, and the mullah
+came out to glare at them and tug his beard and wonder what possessed
+them.
+
+"To Khinjan!" they roared at him. "Lead us to Khinjan!"
+
+"To Khinjan, then!" he thundered, throwing up both arms in a sort of
+double apostolic blessing, and then motioning as if he threw them the
+reins and leave to gallop. They roared back at him like the sea under
+the whip of a gaining wind. And Ismail disappeared among them, leaving
+King alone. Then the mullah's eyes fell on King and he beckoned him.
+
+King went up with an effort, for he ached yet from his struggle of the
+night before. Up there by the ashes of the fire the mullah showed him a
+letter he had crumpled in his fist. There were only a few lines, written
+in Arabic, which all mullahs are supposed to be able to read, and they
+were signed with a strange scrawl that might have meant anything. But
+the paper smelt strongly of her perfume.
+
+"Come, then. Bring all your men, and I will let you and them enter
+Khinjan Caves. We will strike a bargain in the Cavern of Earth's Drink."
+
+That was all, but the fire in the mullah's eyes showed that he thought
+it was enough. He did not doubt that once he should have his extra four
+thousand in the caves Khinjan would be his; and he said so.
+
+"Khinjan is mine!" he growled. "India is mine!"
+
+And King did not answer him. He did not believe Yasmini would be fool
+enough to trust herself in any bargain with Muhammad Anim. Yet he could
+see no alternative as yet. He could only be still and be glad he had set
+the camp moving and so had forced the mullah's hand.
+
+"The old fatalist would have suspected her answer otherwise!" he told
+himself, for he knew that he himself suspected it.
+
+While he and the mullah watched the tents began to fall and the women
+labored to roll them. The men began firing their rifles, and within the
+hour enough ammunition had been squandered to have fought a good-sized
+skirmish; but the mullah did not mind, for he had Khinjan Caves in view,
+and none knew better than he what vast store of cartridges and dynamite
+was piled in there. He let them waste.
+
+Watching his opportunity, King slipped down the ramp and into the crowd,
+while the mullah was busy with personal belongings in the cave. King
+left his own belongings to the fates, or to any thief who should care
+to steal them. He was safe from the mullah in the midst of his nearly
+eighty men, who half believed him a sending from the skies.
+
+"We see! we see!" they yelled and danced around him.
+
+Before ever the mullah gave an order they got under way and started
+climbing the steep valley wall. The mullah on his brown mule thrust
+forward, trying to get in the lead, and King and his men hung back, to
+keep at a distance from him. It was when the mullah had reached the top
+of the slope and was not far from being in the lead that Ismail appeared
+again, leading King's horse, that he had found in possession of another
+man. That did not look like enmity or treachery. King mounted and
+thanked him. Ismail wiped his knife, that had blood on it, and stuck
+his tongue through his teeth, which did not look quite like treachery
+either. Yet the Afridi could not be got to say a word.
+
+Two or three miles along the top of the escarpment the mullah sent back
+word that he wanted the hakim to be beside him. Doubtless he had looked
+back and had seen King on the horse, head and shoulders above the
+baggage.
+
+But King's men treated the messenger to open scorn and sent him packing.
+
+"Bid the mullah hunt himself another hakim! Be thou his hakim! Stay, we
+will give thee a lesson in how to use a knife!"
+
+The man ran, lest they carry out their threat, for men joke grimly in
+the "Hills."
+
+Ismail came and held King's stirrup, striding beside him with the easy
+Hillman gait.
+
+"Art thou my man at last?" King asked him, but Ismail laughed and shook
+his head.
+
+"I am her man."
+
+"Where is she?" King asked.
+
+"Nay, who am I that I should know?"
+
+"But she sent thee?"
+
+"Aye, she sent me."
+
+"To what purpose?"'
+
+"To her purpose!" the Afridi answered, and King could not get another
+word out of him. He fell behind.
+
+But out of the corner of his eye, and once or twice by looking back
+deliberately, King saw that Ismail was taking the members of his new
+band one by one and whispering to them. What he said was a mystery, but
+as they talked each man looked at King. And the more they talked the
+better pleased they seemed. And as the day wore on the more deferential
+they grew. By midday if King wanted to dismount there were three at
+least to hold his stirrup and ten to help him mount again.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVIII
+
+
+
+     By the sweat of your brow;  by the ache of your bones;
+     In the sun, in the wind, in the chill of the rains,
+     Ye sowed as ye knew.  And ye know it was blown
+     To be trodden and burned--aye, and that by your own
+     Who sneered at lean furrows and mocked at the stones.
+     But ye stayed and sowed on.  And a little remains.
+     Ye shall have for your faith.  Ye shall reap for your pains.
+
+
+Four thousand men with women and children and baggage do not move
+so swiftly as one man or a dozen, especially in the "Hills," where
+discipline is reckoned beneath a proud man's honor. There were many
+miles to go before Khinjan when night fell and the mullah bade them
+camp. He bade them camp because they would have done it otherwise in any
+case.
+
+"And we," said King to his all but eighty who crowded around him, "being
+men with new eyes and with a great new hope in us, will halt here and
+eat the evening meal and watch for an opportunity."
+
+"Opportunity for what?" they asked him.
+
+"An opportunity to show how Allah loves the brave!" said King, and they
+had to be content with that, for he would say no more to them. Seeing he
+would not talk, they made their little fires all around him and watched
+while their women cooked the food. The mullah would not let them eat
+until he and the whole camp had prayed like the only righteous.
+
+When the evening meal was eaten, and sentries had been set at every
+vantage point, and the men all sat about cleansing their beards and
+fingers the mullah sent for the hakim again. Only this time he sent
+twenty men to fetch him.
+
+There was so nearly a fight that the skin all down King's back was
+gooseflesh, for a fight at that juncture would have ruined everything.
+At the least he would have been made a hopeless helpless prisoner. But
+in the end the mullah's men drew off snarling, and before they could
+have time to receive new orders or reinforcements, King's die was cast.
+
+There came another order from the mullah. The women and children were to
+be left in camp next dawn, and to remain there until sent for. There
+was murmuring at that around the camp, and especially among King's
+contingent. But King laughed.
+
+"It is good!" he said.
+
+"Why? How so?" they asked him.
+
+"Bid your women make for the Khyber soon after the mullah marches
+tomorrow. Bid them travel down the Khyber until we and they meet!"
+
+"But--"
+
+"Please yourselves, sahibs!" The hakim's air was one of supremest
+indifference. "As for me, I leave no women behind me in the mountains. I
+am content."
+
+They murmured a while, but they gave the orders to their women, and
+King watched the women nod. And all that while Ismail watched him
+with carefully disguised concern, but undisguised interest. And King
+understood. Enlightenment comes to a man swiftly, when it does come, as
+a rule.
+
+He recalled that Yasmini had not done much to make his first entry into
+Khinjan easy. On the contrary, she had put him on his mettle and had set
+Rewa Gunga to the task of frightening him and had tested him and tried
+him before tempting him at last.
+
+She must be watching him now, for even the East repeats itself. She had
+sent Ismail for that purpose. It might be Ismail's business to drive a
+knife in him at the first opportunity, but he doubted that. It was much
+more likely that, having failed in an attempt to have him murdered, she
+was superstitiously remorseful. Her course would depend on his. If he
+failed, she was done with him. If he succeeded in establishing a strong
+position of his own, she would yield.
+
+All of which did not explain Ismail's whisperings and noddings and chin
+strokings with King's contingent. But it explained enough for King's
+present purpose, and he wasted no time on riders to the problem. With
+or without Ismail's aid, with or without his enmity, he must control his
+eighty men and give the slip to the mullah, and he went at once about
+the best way to do both.
+
+"We will go now," he said quietly. "That sentry in yonder shadow has his
+back turned. He has over-eaten. We will rush him and put good running
+between us and the mullah."
+
+Surprised into obedience, and too delighted at the prospect of action to
+wonder why they should obey a hakim so, they slung on their bandoliers
+and made ready. Ismail brought up King's horse and he mounted. And then
+at King's word all eighty made a sudden swoop on the drowsy sentry
+and took him unawares. They tossed him over the cliff, too startled
+to scream an alarm; and though sentries on either hand heard them and
+shouted, they were gone into outer darkness like wind-blown ghosts of
+dead men before the mullah even knew what was happening.
+
+They did not halt until not one of them could run another yard, King
+trusting to his horse to find a footing along the cliff-tops, and to the
+men to find the way.
+
+"Whither?" one whispered to him.
+
+"To Khinjan!" he answered; and that was enough. Each whispered to the
+other, and they all became fired with curiosity more potent than money
+bribes.
+
+When he halted at last and dismounted and sat down and the stragglers
+caught up, panting, they held a council of war all together, with Ismail
+sitting at King's back and leaning a chin on his shoulder in order to
+hear better. Bone pressed on bone, and the place grew numb; King shook
+him off a dozen times; but each time Ismail set his chin back on the
+same spot, as a dog will that listens to his master. Yet he insisted he
+was her man, and not King's.
+
+"Now, ye men of the Hills," said King, "listen to me who am
+political-offender-with-reward-for-capture-offered!" That was a gem of a
+title. It fired their imaginations. "I know things that no soldier would
+find out in a thousand years, and I will tell you some of what I know."
+
+Now he had to be careful. If he were to invent too much they might
+denounce him as a traitor to the "Hills" in general. If he were to tell
+them too little they would lose interest and might very well desert
+him at the first pinch. He must feel for the middle way and upset no
+prejudices.
+
+"She has discovered that this mullah Muhammad Anim is no true muslim,
+but an unbelieving dog of a foreigner from Farangistan! She has
+discovered that he plans to make himself an emperor in these Hills, and
+to sell Hillmen into slavery!" Might as well serve the mullah up hot
+while about it! Beyond any doubt not much more than a mile away the
+mullah was getting even by condemning the lot of them to death. "An eye
+for the risk of an eye!" say the unforgiving Hills.
+
+"If one of us should go back into his camp now he would be tortured. Be
+sure of that."
+
+Breathing deeply in the darkness, they nodded, as if the dark had eyes.
+Ismail's chin drove a fraction deeper into his shoulder.
+
+"Now ye know--for all men know--that the entrance into Khinjan Caves is
+free to any man who can tell a lie without flinching. It is the way out
+again that is not free. How many men do ye know that have entered and
+never returned?"
+
+They all nodded again. It was common knowledge that Khinjan was a very
+graveyard of the presumptuous.
+
+"She has set a trap for the mullah. She will let him and all his men
+enter and will never let them out again!"
+
+"How knowest thou?" This from two men, one on either hand.
+
+"Was I never in Khinjan Caves?" he retorted. "Whence came I? I am her
+man, sent to help trap the mullah! I would have trapped all you, but
+for being weary of these 'Hills' and wishful to go back to India and be
+pardoned! That is who I am! That is how I know!"
+
+Their breath came and went sibilantly, and the darkness was alive with
+the excitement they thought themselves too warrior-like to utter.
+
+"But what will she do then?" asked somebody.
+
+King searched his memory, and in a moment there came back to him a
+picture of the hurrying jezailchi he had held up in the Khyber Pass,
+and recollection of the man's words.
+
+"Know ye not," he said, "that long ago she gave leave to all who ate
+the salt to be true to the salt? She gave the Khyber jezailchis leave to
+fight against her. Be sure, whatever she does, she will stand between no
+man and his pardon!"
+
+"But will she lead a jihad? We will not fight against her!"
+
+"Nay," said King, drawing his breath in. Ismail's chin felt like a knife
+against his collar bone, and Ismail's iron fingers clutched his arm.
+It was time to give his hostage to dame Fortune. "She will go down into
+India and use her influence in the matter of the pardons!"
+
+"I believe thou art a very great liar indeed!" said the man who lacked
+part of his nose. "The Pathan went, and he did not come back. What proof
+have we."
+
+"Ye have me!" said King. "If I show you no proof, how can I escape you?"
+
+They all grunted agreement as to that. King used his elbow to hit Ismail
+in the ribs. He did not dare speak to him; but now was the time for
+Ismail to carry information to her, supposing that to be his job. And
+after a minute Ismail rolled into a shadow and was gone. King gave him
+twenty minutes start, letting his men rest their legs and exercise their
+tongues.
+
+Now that he was out of the mullah's clutches--and he suspected Yasmini
+would know of it within an hour or two, and before dawn in any event--he
+began to feel like a player in a game of chess who foresees his opponent
+mate in so many moves.
+
+If Yasmini were to let the mullah and his men into the Caves and to join
+forces with him in there, he would at least have time to hurry back to
+India with his eighty men and give warning. He might have time to call
+up the Khyber jezailchis and blockade the Caves before the hive could
+swarm, and he chuckled to think of the hope of that.
+
+On the other hand, if there was to be a battle royal between Yasmini and
+the mullah he would be there to watch it and to comfort India with the
+news.
+
+"Now we will go on again, in order to be close to Khinjan at break of
+day," he said, and they all got up and obeyed him as if his word had
+been law to them for years. Of all of them he was the only man in
+doubt--he who seemed most confident of all.
+
+They swung along into the darkness under low-hung stars, trailing behind
+King's horse, with only half a dozen of them a hundred yards or so ahead
+as an advance guard, and all of them expecting to see Khinjan loom
+above each next valley, for distances and darkness are deceptive in the
+"Hills," even to trained eyes. Suddenly the advance guard halted, but
+did not shoot. And as King caught up with them he saw they were talking
+with some one.
+
+He had to ride up close before he recognized the Orakzai Pathan.
+
+"Salaam!" said the fellow with a grin. "I bring one hundred and eleven!"
+
+As he spoke graveyard shadows rose out of the darkness all around and
+leaned on rifles.
+
+"Be ye men all ex-soldiers of the raj?" King asked them.
+
+"Aye!" they growled in chorus.
+
+"What will ye?"
+
+"Pardons!" They all said the word together.
+
+"Who gave you leave to come?" King asked.
+
+"None! He told us of the pardons and we came!"
+
+"Aye!" said the Orakzai Pathan, drawing King aside. "But she gave me
+leave to seek them out and tempt them!"
+
+"And what does she intend?" King asked him suddenly.
+
+"She? Ask Allah, who put the spirit in her! How should I know?"
+
+"We will march again, my brothers!" King shouted, and they streamed
+along behind him, now with no advance guard, but with the Orakzai Pathan
+striding beside King's horse, with a great hand on the saddle. Like the
+others, he seemed decided in his mind that the hakim ought not to be
+allowed much chance to escape.
+
+Just as the dawn was tinting the surrounding peaks with softest rose
+they topped a ridge, and Khinjan lay below them across the mile-wide
+bone-dry valley. They all stood and stared at it, leaning on their guns.
+All the "Men with New Eyes" saw it now for the first time, and it held
+them speechless, for with its patchwork towers and high battlements it
+looked like a very city of the spirits that their tales around the fire
+on winter nights so linger on.
+
+And while they watched, and the Khinjan men were beginning to murmur
+(for they needed no last view of the place to satisfy any longings!)
+none else than Ismail rose from behind a rock and came to King's
+stirrup. He tugged and King backed his horse until they stood together
+apart.
+
+"She sends this message," said Ismail, showing his teeth in the most
+peculiar grin that surely the Hills ever witnessed. And then, omitting
+the message, he proceeded first to give some news. "Many of her men who
+have never been in the army, are none the less true to her, and she will
+not leave them to the mullah's mercy. They will leave the Caves in a
+little while and will come up here. They are to go down into India and
+be made prisoners if the sirkar will not enlist them. You are to wait
+for them here."
+
+"Is that all her message?" King asked him.
+
+"Nay. That is none of it! This is her message. THOU SHALT KNOW THIS DAY,
+THOU ENGLISHMAN, WHETHER OR NOT SHE TRULY LOVED THEE! THERE SHALL BE
+PROOF, SUCH AS EVEN THOU SHALT UNDERSTAND!"'
+
+"What does that mean?"
+
+"Nay, who am I that I should know?"
+
+Ismail slipped away and lost himself among the men, and none of them
+seemed to notice that he had been away and had come again. On King's
+advice a dozen men climbed near-by eminences and began to watch for the
+mullah's coming. The Khinjan men murmured openly; they wanted to be off.
+
+"But no," said King. "Go if ye will, but she has sent word that other
+men are coming. I wait for them here."
+
+After a great deal of resentful argument they consented to lie hidden
+for an hour or two "but no longer," and King hid his horse in a hollow
+and persuaded three of them to gather grass for him. It was a little
+more than an hour after dawn and the chilled rocks were beginning to
+grow warmer when the head of a procession came out of Khinjan Gate and
+started toward them over the valley. In all more than five hundred men
+emerged and about a hundred women and children, and King's men were
+kept busy for half an hour counting them and quarreling about the
+exact number. Some of them were burdened heavily, and there was much
+discussion as to whether to loot them or not. Then:
+
+"Muhammad Anim comes!" shouted a voice from a crag top.
+
+They snuggled into better hiding, and there was no thought now of
+leaving before the mullah should go by. There began to be wagers as to
+whether her men would be hidden out of sight before the mullah could top
+the rise; and then, when the last man was safe across the valley and up
+the cliff and in hiding, there was endless argument as to how much each
+had betted and to whom he had lost. It needed an effort to quiet them
+when the mullah rose into view at last above the rise and paused for a
+minute to stare across at Khinjan before leading his four thousand down
+and onward. He was silent as an image, but his men roared like a river
+in flood and he made no effort to check them. He was like a man who has
+made up his mind to victory in any event. He seemed to be speculating
+three or four moves ahead of this one, and to hold this one such a
+foregone conclusion in his mind that it had ceased to interest. He was
+admirable, there was no doubt of that. In his own way, like an old
+boar sniffing up the wind for trouble, he could command a decent man's
+respect.
+
+He dismounted, for he had to, and tossed his reins to the nearest
+man with the air of an emperor. And he led the way dawn the cliffside
+without hesitation, striding like a mountaineer. His men followed him
+noisily, holding hands to make human chains at the difficult places
+and shouting a great deal; but not quite naturally now. They were too
+impressed by the seriousness of what they undertook, and in their hearts
+too much afraid. The noise was bravado.
+
+It was a weary long wait, watching from the crevices until the last
+man's back departed down the cliff, and the procession--Pied Piper of
+Hamelin and rats, (but no music!)--wound across the valley. At last
+Khinjan Gate opened and the mullah led in. The gate did not shut after
+the last man, King noted that.
+
+"Let us go now!" shouted fifty voices, and every man of King's party
+showed himself and stretched. "Let us go! Why wait?"
+
+But King would not go. Nor would he explain why he would not go. Nor
+could he tell himself what held him, gazing at Khinjan, except that he
+thought of Yasmini and ached to know what she was doing.
+
+It was thirty minutes after the last of the mullahs men had vanished
+through the gate, and his own men in dozens and twenties were scattered
+along the cliff-top arguing against delay with growing rancor, when
+a lone horseman galloped out of Khinjan Gate and started across the
+valley. He rode recklessly. He was either panic-stricken or else bolder
+than the devil.
+
+In a minute King had recognized the mare, and so had the eyes of fifty
+men around him. No man with half an eye for a horse could have failed
+to recognize that black mare, having ever seen her once. She came like
+a goat among the rocks, just as she had once dived into darkness in the
+Khyber with King following. In another two minutes King had recognized
+the Rangar's silken turban. And now there was no need to restrain the
+men; they all stood and watched, to know what new turn affairs were
+taking.
+
+Most of them were staring downward at the Rangar's head as he urged the
+mare up the cliff path, when the explanation of Yasmini's message came.
+It was only King, urged by some intuition, who had his eyes fixed on
+Khinjan.
+
+There came a shock that actually swayed the hill they stood on. The mare
+on the path below missed her footing and fell a dozen feet, only to
+get up again and scramble as if a thousand devils were behind her, the
+Rangar riding her grimly, like a jockey in a race. Three more shocks
+followed. A great slice of Khinjan suddenly caved in with a roar, and
+smoke and dust burst upward through the tumbling crust.
+
+There was a pause after that, as if the waiting elements were gathering
+strength. For ten minutes they watched and scarcely breathed. Rewa Gunga
+gained the summit and, dismounting, stood by King with the reins over
+his arm. The mare was too blown to do anything but stand and tremble.
+And King was too enthralled to do anything but stare.
+
+"That is what a woman can do for a man!" said Rewa Gunga grimly. "She
+set a fuse and exploded all the dynamite. There were tons of it! The
+galleries must have fallen in, one on the other! A thousand men digging
+for a thousand years could never get into Khinjan now, and the only way
+out is down Earth's Drink! She bade me come and bid you good-by, sahib.
+I would have stayed in there, but she commanded me. She said, 'Tell King
+sahib my love was true. Tell him I give him India and all Asia that were
+at my mercy!'"
+
+While the Rangar spoke there came three more earth tremors in swift
+succession, and a thunder out of Khinjan as if the very "Hills" were
+coming to an end. The mare grew frantic and the Rangar summoned six men
+to hold her.
+
+Suddenly, right over the top of Khinjan's upper rim, where only the
+eagles ever perched, there burst a column of water, immeasurable, huge,
+that for a moment blotted out the sun. It rose sheer upward, curved on
+itself, and fell in a million-ton deluge on to Khinjan and into Khinjan
+valley, hissing and roaring and thundering.
+
+Earth's Drink had been blocked by the explosion and had found a new
+way over the barrier before plunging down again into the bowels of
+the world. The one sky-flung leap it made as its weight burst down a
+mountain wall was enough to blot out Khinjan forever, and what had been
+a dry mile-wide moat was a shallow lake with death's rack and rubbish
+floating on the surface.
+
+The earth rocked. The Hillmen prayed, and King stared, trying to
+memorize all that had been. Suddenly it flashed across his mind that the
+Rangar who had striven like a fiend to stab him only a matter of hours
+ago was now standing behind him, within a yard.
+
+He was up on his feet in a second and faced about. The Rangar laughed.
+
+"So ends the 'Heart of the Hills!'" he said. "Think kindly of her,
+sahib. She thought well enough of you!"
+
+He laughed again and sprang on the black mare, and before King could
+speak or raise a hand to stop him he was off, hell-bent-for-leather
+along the precipice in the direction of the Khyber Pass and India. Two
+of the men who had come out of Khinjan mounted and spurred after him.
+
+King collected his men and the women and children. It was easy, for they
+were numb from what they had witnessed and dazed by fear. In half an
+hour he had them mustered and marching.
+
+"Let us go back and loot the mullah's camp and take the women!" urged a
+dozen men at least.
+
+"Go then!" said King. "Go back! But I go on!"
+
+"He is afraid! The hakim is afraid of what he saw!"
+
+King let them think so. He let them think anything they chose, knowing
+well that what had unnerved him had at least rendered them amenable to
+leading. They would have no more dared go back without him, and without
+at least a hundred others, than they would have dared go and hunt in the
+ruins of Khinjan.
+
+Even Ismail clang to his stirrup and would not leave him, looking like
+a fledgling with his beard all new-sprouted on his jaw, and eyes wider
+than any bird's.
+
+"Why art thou here?" King asked him. "Had she no true men who would die
+with her?"
+
+The Afridi scowled, but choked the answer back.
+
+"Art thou my man now?" King asked him. But he shook his head.
+
+So they marched without talking over the hideous boulder-strewn range
+that separates Khinjan from the Khyber, sleeping fitfully whenever King
+called a halt, and eating almost nothing at all, for only a few of them
+had thought of bringing food.
+
+They reached the Khyber famished and were fed at Ali Masjid Fort, after
+King had given a certain password and had whispered to the officer
+commanding. But he did not change into European clothes yet, and none of
+his following suspected him of being an Englishman.
+
+"A Rangar on a black mare has gone down the pass ahead of you in a
+hurry," they told him at Ali Masjid. "He had two men with him and food
+enough. Only stopped long enough to make his business known."
+
+"What did he say his business is?" asked King.
+
+"He gave a sign and said a word that satisfied us--on that point!"
+
+"Oh!" said King. "Can you signal down the Pass?"
+
+"Surely."
+
+"Courtenay still at Jamrud?"
+
+"Yes. In charge there and growing tired of doing nothing."
+
+"Signal down and ask him to have that bath ready for me that I spoke
+about. Good-by."
+
+So he left Ali Masjid at the head of a motley procession that grew
+noisier and more confident every hour. Ismail still clung to his
+stirrup, but began to grow more lively and to have a good many orders to
+fling to the rest.
+
+"You mourn like a dog," King told him. "Three howls and a whine and a
+little sulking--and then forgetfulness!"
+
+Ismail looked nasty at that but did not answer, although he seemed to
+have a hot word ready. And thenceforward he hung his head more, and at
+least tried to seem bereaved. But his manner was unconvincing none the
+less, and King found it food for thought.
+
+The ex-soldiers and would-be soldiers marched in fours behind him,
+growing hourly more like drilled men, and talking, with each stride that
+brought them nearer India, more as men do who have an interest in law
+and order. Behind them tramped the women from Khinjan, carrying their
+babies and their husbands loads; and behind them again were the other
+women, who had been told they would be overtaken in the Khyber, but who
+had actually had to run themselves raw-footed in order to catch up.
+
+Down the Khyber have come conquerors, a dozen conquering kings, and as
+many beaten armies; but surely no stranger host than this ever trudged
+between the echoing walls. The very eagles screamed at them.
+
+And as they neared Jamrud Fort the men who sought pardons began to grow
+sheepish. They began to remember that the hakim might after all be a
+trickster, and to realize how much too friendly--how almost intimate he
+had been with the sahibs at Ali Masjid. They began to cluster round
+him instead of letting him lead, and by the time they met the farthest
+outposts up the Khyber they were as nervous as raw recruits and ready to
+turn and bolt at a word--for no one can be more timid than your Hillman
+when he is not sure of himself, just as no one can be braver when he
+knows his ground.
+
+Signals preceded them, and Courtenay himself rode up the Pass to greet
+them. But of course he was not very cordial to King, considering his
+disguise; and he chose to keep the Hillmen in doubt yet as to their
+eventual reception. But one of them, the Orakzai Pathan (for nothing
+could completely unman him), shouted to know whether it was true that
+pardons had been offered for deserters, and Courtenay nodded. They were
+less timid after that. Some of them pulled medals out and pinned them
+outside their shirts.
+
+At Jamrud they were given food and their rifles were taken away from
+them and a guard was set to watch them. But the guard only consisted
+of two men, both of whom were Pathans, and they assured them that,
+ridiculous though it sounded, the British were actually willing to
+forgive their enemies and to pardon all deserters who applied for pardon
+on condition of good faith in the future.
+
+That night they prayed to Allah like little children lost and found. The
+women crooned love-songs to their babies over the clear fires and the
+men talked--and talked--and talked until the stars grew big as moons to
+weary eyes and they slept at last, to dream of khaki uniforms and karnel
+sahibs who knew neither fear nor favor and who said things that were so.
+It is a mad world to the Himalayan Hillman where men in authority tell
+truth unadorned without shame and without consideration--a mad, mad
+world, and perhaps too exotic to be wholesome, but pleasant while the
+dream lasts.
+
+Over in the fort Courtenay placed a bath at King's disposal and lent him
+clean clothes and a razor. But he was not very cordial.
+
+"Tell me all the war news!" said King, splashing in the tub. And
+Courtenay told him, passing him another cake of soap when the first
+was finished. After all there was not much to tell--butchery in
+Belgium--Huns and guns--and the everlastingly glorious stand that saved
+Paris and France and Europe.
+
+"According to the cables our men are going the records one better. I
+think that's all," said Courtenay.
+
+"Then why the stuffiness?" asked King. "Why am I talked to at the end of
+a tube, so to speak?"
+
+"You're under arrest!" said Courtenay.
+
+"The deuce I am!"
+
+"I'm taking care of you myself to obviate the necessity of putting a
+sentry on guard over you."
+
+"Good of you, I'm sure. What's it all about?"
+
+"I don't mind telling you, but I'd rather you'd wait. The minute you
+were sighted word was wired down to headquarters, and the general
+himself will be up here by train any minute."
+
+"Very well," said King. "Got a cigar? Got a black one? Blacker the
+better!"
+
+He was out of his bath and remembered that minute that he had not smoked
+a cigar since leaving India. Naked, shaved, with some of the stain
+removed, he did not look like a man in trouble as he filled his lungs
+with the saltpeterish smoke of a fat Trichinopoli.
+
+And then the general came and did not wait for King to get dressed but
+burst into the bathroom and shook hands with him while he was still
+naked and asked ten questions (like a gatling gun) while King was
+getting on his trousers, divining each answer after the third word and
+waving the rest aside.
+
+"And why am I arrested, sir?" asked King the moment he could slip the
+question in edgewise.
+
+"Oh, yes, of course. Try the case here as well as anywhere. What does
+this mean?"
+
+Out of his pocket the general produced a letter that smelt strongly of
+a scent King recognized. He spread it out on a table, and King read. It
+was Yasmini's letter that she had sent down the Khyber to make India too
+hot to hold him.
+
+        "Your Captain King has been too much trouble.  He has
+        taken money from the Germans.  He adopted native dress.
+        He called himself Kurram Khan.  He slew his own brother
+        at night in the Khyber Pass.  These men will say that
+        he carried the head to Khinjan, and their word is true.
+        I, Yasmini, saw.  He used the head for a passport to
+        obtain admittance.  He proclaims a jihad!  He urges
+        invasion of India!  He held up his brother's head before
+        five thousand men and boasted of the murder.  The next
+        you shall hear of your Captain King of the Khyber Rifles
+        he will be leading a jihad into India.  You would have
+        better trusted me.  Yasmini."
+
+"Too bad about your brother," said the general.
+
+"The body is buried. How much is true about the head?"
+
+King told him.
+
+"Where's she?" asked the general.
+
+King did not answer. The general waited.
+
+"I don't know, sir."
+
+"Ask the Rangar," Courtenay suggested.
+
+"Where is he?" asked King.
+
+"Caught him coming down the Khyber on his black mare and arrested him.
+He's in the next room! I hope he's to be hanged. So that I can buy the
+mare," he added cheerfully.
+
+King whistled softly to himself, and the general looked at him through
+half-closed eyes.
+
+"Go in and talk to him, King. Let me know the result."
+
+He had picked King to go up the Khyber on that errand not for nothing.
+He knew King and he knew the symptoms. Without answering him King
+obeyed. He went out of the room into a dark corridor and rapped on the
+door of the next room to the right. There was a muffled answer from
+within. Courtenay shouted something to the sentry outside the door and
+he called another man who fitted a key in the lock. King walked into a
+room in which one lamp was burning and the door slammed shut behind him.
+
+He was in there an hour, and it never did transpire just what passed,
+for he can hold his tongue on any subject like a clam, and the general,
+if anything, can go him one better. Courtenay was placed under orders
+not to talk, so those who say they know exactly what happened in the
+room between the time when the door was shut on King and the time when
+he knocked to have it opened and called for the general, are not telling
+the truth.
+
+What is known is that finally the general hurried through the door and
+ejaculated, "Well, I'm damned!" before it could close again. The sentry
+(Punjabi Mussulman) has sworn to that over a dozen camp-fires since the
+day.
+
+And it is known, too, for the sentry has taken oath on it and has told
+the story so many times without much variation that no one who knows the
+man's record doubts any longer--it is known that when the door opened
+again King and the general walked out, with the Rangar between them. And
+the Rangar had no turban on, but carried it unwound in his hand. And his
+golden hair fell nearly to his knees and changed his whole appearance.
+And he was weeping. And he was not a Rangar at all, but she, and how
+anybody can ever have mistaken her for a man, even in man's clothes and
+with her skin darkened, was beyond the sentry's power to guess. He for
+one, etc.... But nobody believed that part of his tale.
+
+As Yussuf bin Ali said over the camp-fire up the Khyber later on, "When
+she sets out to disguise herself, she is what she will be, and he who
+says he thinks otherwise has two tongues and no conscience!"
+
+What is surely true is that the four of them--Yasmini, the general,
+Courtenay and King sat up all night in a room in the fort, talking
+together, while a succession of sentries overstrained their ears
+endeavoring to hear through keyholes. And the sentries heard nothing and
+invented very much.
+
+But Partan Singh, the Sikh, who carried in bread and cocoa to them at
+about five the next morning and found them still talking, heard King
+say, "So, in my opinion, sir, there'll be no jihad in these parts.
+There'll be sporadic raids, of course, but nothing a brigade can't deal
+with. The heart of the holy war's torn out and thrown away."
+
+"Very well," said the general. "You can get up the Khyber again and join
+your regiment."'
+
+But by that time the Rangar's turban was on again and the tears were
+dry, and it was Partan Singh who threw most doubt on the sentry's tale
+about the golden hair. But, as the sentry said, no doubt Partan Singh
+was jealous.
+
+There is no doubt whatever that the general went back to Peshawur in the
+train at eight o'clock and that the Rangar went with him in a separate
+compartment with about a dozen Hillmen chosen from among those who had
+come down with King.
+
+And it is certain that before they went King had a talk with the Rangar
+in a room alone, of which conversation, however, the sentry reported
+afterward that he did not overhear one word; and he had to go to the
+doctor with a cold in his ear at that. He said he was nearly sure he
+heard weeping. But on the other hand, those who saw both of them come
+out were certain that both were smiling.
+
+It is quite certain that Athelstan King went up the Khyber again, for
+the official records say so, and they never lie, especially in time of
+war. He rode a coal-black mare, and Courtenay called him "Chikki"--a
+"lifter."
+
+Some say the Rangar went to Delhi. Some say Yasmini is in Delhi. Some
+say no. But it is quite certain that before he started up the Khyber
+King showed Courtenay a great gold bracelet that he had under his
+sleeve. Five men saw him do it.
+
+And if that was really Rewa Gunga in the general's train, why was the
+general so painfully polite to him? And why did Ismail insist on riding
+in the train, instead of accepting King's offer to go up the Khyber with
+him?
+
+One thing is very certain. King was right about the jihad. There has
+been none in spite of all Turkey's and Germany's efforts. There have
+been sporadic raids, much as usual, but nothing one brigade could not
+easily deal with, the paid press to the contrary notwithstanding.
+
+King of the Khyber Rifles is now a major, for you can see that by
+turning up the army list.
+
+But if you wish to know just what transpired in the room in Jamrud Fort
+while the general and Courtenay waited, you must ask King--if you dare;
+for only he knows, and one other. It is not likely you can find the
+other.
+
+But it is likely that you may hear from both of them again, for "A woman
+and intrigue are one!" as India says. The war seems long, and the world
+is large, and the chances for intrigue are almost infinite, given such
+combination as King and Yasmini and a love affair.
+
+And as King says on occasion: "Kuch dar nahin hai! There is no such
+thing as fear!" Another one might say, "The roof's the limit!"
+
+And bear in mind, for this is important: King wrote to Yasmini a letter,
+in Urdu from the mullah's cave, in which he as good as gave her his word
+of honor to be her "loyal servant" should she choose to return to her
+allegiance. He is no splitter of hairs, no quibbler. His word is good on
+the darkest night or wherever he casts a shadow in the sun.
+
+"A man and his promise--a woman and intrigue--are one!"
+
+
+The End
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's King--of the Khyber Rifles, by Talbot Mundy
+
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